Is it a sign of the times? A harbinger of things to come? A chilling move to bar patients from receiving medical care who fall into categories that make them less than ideal patients?

According to UK's Daily Mail reporting, last year it was obese patients in east Suffolk who were refused medical care involving surgery. Now, if you are a patient treated through the Norfolk Primary Care Trust or Newcastle-Under-Lyme PCT in north Staffordshire, in need of life-changing surgery and smoke, you will be denied care unless you quit smoking.

It appears to be a matter of saving money. Public health trusts are stating that smokers suffer more complications after surgery and require more care which translates into higher health care treatment costs in financial dollars.

It would be a good idea for people who are overweight to maintain a healthy weight. Being overweight can lead to a diminished physical quality of life and disease. It would be a good idea for a smoker to quit smoking. Smoking is bad for your health, no doubt. Each of us should feel a sense of personal responsibility to live as healthy as possible to avoid disease, and to a certain extent be held accountable for the choices we make. But to be denied medical care? Today it is hip and knee replacements. Tomorrow?

This new health care policy seems a slippery slope. It makes me feel uneasy -- not reflecting our most humane and compassionate nature. It raises more than a few questions. One day, will there be additional lifestyle choices added to the criteria of who is denied care? Cancer treatments are very expensive. Could we see a day, in order to keep costs down, that some cancer patients would be denied care based on lifestyle choices? More than one expert has suggested a significant percentage of cancer development is based on lifestyles. I am just wondering where this type of policy might eventually lead.

How does the policy in cutting health care costs based on a patient's weight or lifestyle habits make you feel? Would you be in agreement to deny care to someone who practices a lifestyle habit deemed unhealthy?

It is a well-known research-based fact that women who breastfeed have a decreased risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer. Which makes the story of Victoria's Secret nebulous breastfeeding policy and the unfortunate experience of a breastfeeding mother from Wisconsin relevant.

Rebecca Cook was shopping with a friend at a Victoria's Secret store last week when she asked if she could use a dressing room to breastfeed her baby. The store clerk told her no and led Cook and her infant to an employee restroom. Cook says when the clerk opened the bathroom door, the inside of the bathroom was disgusting. At that, Cook told the clerk "No, I don't eat in the bathroom and my daughter doesn't eat in the bathroom."  According to Cook, the stork clerk told her that using the dressing rooms for the purpose of breastfeeding would be unsanitary because people change in them.

Cook, with other nursing mothers, staged a breastfeeding sit-in protest outside the Victoria's Secret store. They believe that a company that has made their fortune from breasts is discriminating against nursing mothers. In addition to the protest in Wisconsin, similar protests were held in front of Victoria's Secret stores in several states by nursing mothers who have been denied the right to breastfeed in a public place.

Breastfeeding being unsanitary is absurd and I have to question the attitude and motive of the sales clerk who handled Cook's request for a dressing room, or even just a place to sit in the back of the dressing room hallway, by leading her to an unclean employee restroom as the only place to breastfeed her infant. Victoria's Secret needs to make it abundantly clear they support nursing mothers who shop in their stores. If breastfeeding is a health benefit for the mother in cancer prevention, and she chooses to breastfeed her baby for the many benefits to her baby's health and her own, is she supposed to stay home for a solid year or more until she is done breastfeeding? What do you think?