The ludicrously misinformed Tory MP (and former GP) Sarah Wollaston is at it again. I had a few choice words to say about her in a recent Blog post – but this time she’s gone overboard with her litany of misinformation and shoddy reasoning.
First the
misinformation: you’d expect an ex-GP who is now chairwoman of
the Commons Health Select Committee to be better informed than this, but
Wollaston’s claim that binge-eating obese people cost the government a lot of
money is false. A study showed that
smokers and obese people actually save
the health service money, because although they cost more than healthy
people between the ages of 20 to 56, they also die sooner
than the healthy group, meaning it costs less to treat them in aggregate terms.
Plus, add in the State pension savings for those who die young and you’ll see
the case against Sarah Wollaston’s claim is even more compounding.
Now the shoddy reasoning:
Wollaston exclaims the need for regulation to force stores to offer discounts
on fruit and vegetables. The only way to achieve this is price-fixing – that
is, fixing the amount that supermarkets can charge for healthier foods like fruit
and vegetables. But it is beyond foolish to even entertain the idea of
price-fixing because price-fixing is guaranteed to get the situation wrong. If
the price is fixed too low then demand will increase and willing suppliers will
diminish, creating a shortage of supply. If the price is fixed too high then
consumption will decrease, which in the case of fruit and vegetables will
achieve the opposite of the desired effect. The only way to optimise the price
is to leave it to market forces, which, of course, involves no price-fixing at
all.
With people like
Sarah Wollaston in The Conservatives, it’s little wonder that there are so many
rumours about several Tory MPs wanting to follow Douglas Carswell and Mark
Reckless and switch to UKIP.
