The Food Nazis and Smoking Fascists are always out there saying they are trying to save us health care costs by policing what we eat, whether we can wear seat belts, what we can put in our bodies, etc. They try to argue the economic point that giving up some liberty will save us money. It appears they are full of it.
Hat Tip to Interested Participant...
From the Daily Mail:
The reason is that the healthy tend to live longer and so, while they might not have to battle lung cancer, heart disease or diabetes in their fifties, they may need long-term care for illnesses of old age such as Alzheimer's.
As a result, any "savings" made by them being healthy when young are more than offset by their being ill in old age.
Based on healthcare costs in Holland, where the study was conducted, a person of normal weight can expect their medical bills from the age of 20 to total £210,000 over the course of their lifetime, while an obese person's costs will be £187,000. Smokers, whose life expectancy is the shortest of the three, cost the least, at £165,000, the researchers from the National Institute for Public Health and Environment calculated.
Writing in the journal PLoS Medicine, the researchers said: "Obesity increases the risk of diseases such as diabetes, increasing healthcare utilisation but decreasing life expectancy.
"Unfortunately, these life-years gained are not lived in full health and come at a price: people suffer from other diseases which increases healthcare costs. The underlying mechanism is that there is a substitution of inexpensive, lethal diseases towards less lethal, and therefore more costly diseases."
Look, I don't think we need to kill ourselves to lessen health care costs, but neither do I think we need to engage in such intrusive control as all out smoking bans or banning fat people from eating at restaurants (as some in our own country want to do (see archives last week)) or telling people they can't make dumb decisions.
The economic argument is invalid....what else is just might be?
Let me also go on the record as saying I am a nonsmoker, and while I support smoking bans in family restaurants, I think bans in bars are stupid.
