One of the authors of a new report warning that obesity may shorten life expectancy says the upside of such a scenario would be that in causing early death, obesity would essentially save Social Security.

You wonder how people like this get doctorates. First, the report itself is bunk. It’s not even a numbers-based study. It’s the opinions of a few public health researchers bundled into a “report” with an accompanying press release. The Center for Consumer Freedom takes it down here.

I’d add that if we’ve been getting fatter for thirty years, we should at least be seeing the beginnings of this looming healthcare crisis. We haven’t. Life expectancy is up across the board, and is up more among the demographic groups who seem to be getting fattest. Not only that, but two diseases commonly linked to obesity — heart disease and cancer — have seen dramatic decreases in both incidence and mortality over the last 15 years. In fact, deaths from nine of the ten types of cancer most associated with obesity have dropped since the early 1990s.

The idea that obesity will save Social Security is dumb for other reasons, too. Most notably, the elderly are the one age group least likely to be obese. If obesity really does cause premature death, it’ll be among those below the retirement age, not above it — or among those funding the system, not those drawing from it. That will widen the Social Security shortfall, not narrow it.

All of that said, there is still an important point lurking here: Our elected officials are simultaneously passing new entitlement programs for an aging population and passing laws that restrict our choices in an effort to keep more of us living longer. Those two trends don’t work well together. The best thing that can happen from this scenario is wholesale, systemic breakdown. The worst is that both processes continue apace, and we all live longer, blander, higher-taxed, less free lives.

And Agitator readers chip in to buy an island off the coast of Africa.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2005 at 10:23 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.