Some research indicates that obese people cost a healthcare system less because they die earlier and thus avoid incurring the costs associated with old age, which tend to be significant. Shizzo is -- in his own way -- thus selflessly assisting the Obama Administration in arresting healthcare costs in this country. Thank you for your service, brother!
Does Preventing Obesity Lead to Reduced Health-Care Costs?http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2225433/"In a study in this issue of PLoS Medicine, Pieter van Baal and colleagues used data from The Netherlands to simulate the annual and lifetime medical costs attributable to obesity [1].The researchers explored the question of whether reducing obesity would lead to reduced or increased health-care costs
Their results tell us that that life expectancy from age 20 is reduced by 5 years for obese people and 7 for smokers. The consequence is that healthy people live to incur greater medical expenditure subsequently on average, more than compensating for the earlier excess expenditure related to obesity or smoking.
The recent Foresight report on obesity in the United Kingdom looks ahead to 2050 and stresses that obesity rates are rising, that the determinants of these rises are complex and go much further than individual control of diet and exercise, and that if nothing changes costs to the health service and society will increase as a direct consequence [2].
Yet van Baal and colleagues' study suggests that obese people cost less to health services than nonobese people. Smokers cost still less. Clearly at a time when obesity is deemed a major health issue, in part because of its putative health-care costs, the results of this new study sound paradoxical."
