Link: Actually, a long, healthy life costs more - Health care- msnbc.com.
I confess I had been getting increasingly irked at the strain of innuendo among certain health pundits to the effect of "those awful inconsiderate fat people, costing the rest of us so much in inflated insurance and medical costs because of their unhealthy lifestyles." But, as one person is quoted in this article, this study “throws a bucket of cold water” onto that whole line of fear-mongering: statistically, thin healthy people actually cost the system more over their lifetimes than fat people.
Of course I don't want heavier people given short shrift in any way when seeking real, useful medical help for their health issues. But, again as the article says, I'd like to see that help offered for the right reasons--not because of some blame-the-victim mythology about how many healthcare dollars society erroneously believes fat people are "wasting".
But I also think the article doesn't go quite far enough. I'm willing to speculate that the cost differences uncovered by this study may well have been known all along by the health care industry. Hell, those insurance companies do their managed-care cost savings analyses on every little thing these days; so I find it hard to believe that it's escaped their attention that long-lived healthy people generate more revenue for them than obese people.
I can't help thinking: if I were a Machiavellian health-care bean-counter, aware that fat people aren't costing the system/bringing in as much revenue as thin people, how would I suggest the company take advantage of that disparity? Would I recommend to my bosses that "curing" fat people be less of a priority because they don't earn the company as much (which is how they used to treat us)? Or perhaps that the company participate in this new-fangled War on Obesity, diseasifying fat and coming up with costly new "treatments" so that it contributes more to their bottom line (which is this brave new world of super-expensive bariatric surgeries and medically-supervised fasts)?
Thnk that's overly cynical? Well, considering such health-insurance practices as taking claims for major--and expensive--health care crises as a cue to find any flimsy excuse to cancel the claimant's policy so the comapny doesn't have to pay up, thus dooming the claimant to medical and/or financial disaster, I'd say it's not too much of a stretch to imagine other egregious ethics violations on the part of this industry. There's just been too many examples of the bottom line trumping patient needs to leave me anything other than cynical.
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