There has always been a lot of hostility towards addicts whether it’s drugs, booze, or smoking.
Some non-addicts got to experience that treatment during COVID with many saying “We’re not going to treat you if you’re not vaxxed” stuff, along with other social exclusions.
From the perspective of doctors and nurses who have this hostility, it can be boiled down to one word:
Pride
As the expert in health, such ones take great offense if you do not follow their instructions for averting illness and in response basically just say, well screw you.
However this does not apply to other areas where people may not follow healthy advice:
You never hear anyone say, well if you don’t stop having gay sex, we’re not going to treat you for AIDS.
If you don’t stop playing football or boxing, we’re not going to treat your concussion.
And if you consider that if two virgins marry and stay true, the closest thing they’d get to an STD is a yeast infection, so there goes STD treatments for anyone who doesn’t follow church advice right?
This hostility is the kernel for the Chinese social credit system. In the US, we have it built into insurance where commie care first introduced charging more for smokers and obese (obese subsequently removed - too many fat lawmakers, I guess).
Penalizing riskier behavior would be ok if it’s proportional to the risk vs actual payouts and you don’t pick and choose which risky behaviors to penalize or not.
E.g., Are people who play contact sports penalized? There is plenty of money spent treating sports injuries and if you happen to be a teenager who’s paralyzed during football that’s quite a lot of expenses to incur over a long lifetime. But such participation is considered “healthy” and may actually get you a credit.
Insurance companies have the data. They can correlate payouts to certain behaviors easy.
There is also the circumstance when risk is replaced by certainty in increased payouts, e.g. being born with type I diabetes - you need insulin, et al, for life. Should they be charged more? or not because it’s “not their fault”?
So insurance is required to charge more for someone who MAY get sick in the future, but not allowed to charge more for those who ARE sick now because it’s “pre-exisiting”.
Like the social credit system in China, folks want to use insurance as punishment and only for the risky behaviors they don’t like.
I take your point, and the medical profession like to distance themselves from the problems of patients. But various addiction disorders are all too common among doctors and nurses themselves. Heavy drinking, over use of tranquilizers, etc.
Amusing side note: during the pandemic, I was on reddit a lot, and people were going on and on about those who wouldn't wear a mask all day. I'd say they were like gay men who wouldn't wear a condom for sex during the AIDS crisis, and I would get immediately banned from that subreddit. It became kind of a game to see how many subreddits I could get banned from. Answer: a lot! LOL!