Encourage people to eat and smoke more.
Because they die sooner, and, believe it or not, end up incurring lower health care costs than their healthier brethren.
That’s the rather uncomfortable conclusion of a Dutch study reported by our colleague Bob Laszewski on Health Care Policy and Marketplace Review. According to an article on the report, “from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.”
The net cost differential in favor of the unhealthy folks was 12%, or $45,000.
The study was an academic extrapolation of data, and was not based on actual claims information. And there’s one significant problem with the conclusion -given how fat we Americans are getting, our costs should be heading down, and fast.
Feb
20
On behalf of us “Obese” people out there, let me just add what bull these “studies” are. They have been saying the same thing since the 70’s, yet average weight in the USA has increased, while the life expectancy continues to climb. Go figure!!
Genetics (including the average weight we will be) cannot be controlled, you can work at it, but some things are just the way they are. I think to my own family and realize a few things, we generally are “heavy”, we all have high BP, we are diabetic, and we all generally die in our mid-late 80’s. We also have poor vision and a tendency for blonde hair and baldness.
As to the cost associated with these matters, that is a factor to be considered when issueing a health care policy. What we do not need to tolerate as a society is the attitude that “obese” people need to be treated differently, charged more, forced to change lifestyles when in fact that may not be the root cause of the problem.
There is much more to this issue than meets the eye and it deserves more study, perhaps over a good burger and a beer! :-)
I am a fat girl, and just feel happy to live large. Recently I read the positive news on “pluscupid.com” about overweight people. It says that they live longer than skinny ones. They feel happy and just be themselves to enjoy the life.