An avid birdy by the name of Laura send us a link that explains that solving obesity does not save the government money because those people live longer and require more health expenditures.
I did a little researching and found the actual published paper. Read it here.
The authors conclude:
Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.
That’s unfortunate given our debate on protecting people from their own eating habits. Survival of the fit-ist anyone? More like survival of the most expensive.
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Tagged as: costs, Government, healthcare, healthy, obesity
I’ve heard that there are studies saying that nonsmokers cost more in healthcare than smokers, based upon the same reasoning. Only hearsay. I’ve never seen the studies themselves. But the idea is that smokers die off more quickly, and less expensively, than their nonsmoking counterparts (whose healthiness bleeds the system).
i can haz chzbrgur?
Maybe I’ll have a pizza for lunch. Love the pic !
I heart spudnuts….
Parlie - fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
ThatGrrl, that was a notorious argument put forth by the smoking industry itself. Or maybe it was in internal docs, and then they decided not to publicize it! Came out in congressional testimony. Can’t recall the details.
Details: it was in a report by Philip Morris to the Czech gov’t.
http://www.tobacco.org/news/71782.html
But has also been used by diva ethics profs, the pole dancing strippers of philosophers:
http://heapro.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/15/4/355
search to “whether smoking should be encouraged”
How ironic, as the only thing I like less than fat people is old people.
I’m all about sending them both off on an ice float once they are no longer useful, but I guess global warming fucked that up, too.
Without fat people the world would be less jolly, though. Just a thought.
True - Santa gets a stay of execution. And so does Norm from Cheers (and pretty much all other comedians of excessive girth), as long as I don’t have to sit next to ‘em on an airplane.
Yeah, I luv that big seat at the movie theater. Or is that a love seat?
without fat people, rich guys wouldn’t be so excited to spend their money on hot chicks. getting rid of fat people would ruin it for us.
@8: but not Louie Anderson. He wasn’t funny.
@9: that’s a chub seat
@10: huh?
Gob, when there’s a comment awaiting moderation, the post numbers get askew. I have a comment up there full of foot fetish notes about the smoking b.s., and it got delayed for moderation.
Dang it. Moderate this, you bastards.
You think that’s a fat squirrel?
Just wait….
“government” is the key word here. We don’t have nationalized health care, so it’s really the average consumer that foots the bill when the extraordinary costs of health care are passed on from the insurance companies. You can’t compare a study in the Netherlands to what happens here in the U.S. Our health system is completely different.
Get real, we don’t have a “system”. And we do all pay for it. At least, the part that we haven’t put on our national credit card, funded by our grandkids and the Chinese government.
Rant over. Ethan, I wonder how much extraordinary cost individuals do absorb. “Extraordinary” probably means most people can’t foot it and the cost gets inflated and spread around like an embolism.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to argue. The research in the article sounds bogus just on account of there being many variables between the Netherlands and the United States.