I haven’t had time to take a thorough look at today’s alarmist study on healthcare spending related to obesity, though I’m sure it’s beset by all the definition, epidemiological, and research bias problems that plague similar studies. All of that aside, here’s what you need to know:

Between 1987 and 2002, private spending on obesity-linked medical problems mushroomed from $3.6 billion, or 2 percent of all health spending, to $36.5 billion or 11.6 percent of spending, the study, published in the journal Health Affairs, found.

Where, exactly, is the problem, here? Seems to me that people are making their own decisions about diet and health, and paying for the consequences of those decisions. To the extent that we’re sharing those costs in the form of group health plans, we should be shopping for group health plans that distribute risk in a more preferable manner — i.e. by rewarding good habits and punishing bad ones.

But if this is all at private expense, where’s the public policy issue? Isn’t it posssible that some people simply enjoy eating more than exercising? And if they and they alone bear the consequences of those preferences, why do we need to change them?

Of course, the problem comes with Medicare and Medicaid. The far easier solution would be to reform those programs to instill some notion of personal accountability. But that won’t do. We’re dealing with “public health” activists, here. So the only solution is to bring in the state, and punish everyone for the habits of a few:

“We’re going to have to tackle this they way we did smoking - with a variety of big strategies,” Thorpe said.

With tobacco, that included taxes on cigarettes, an aggressive push for new products like the nicotine patch and a big role for government.

Lovely. Considering that the current “big strategy” to smoking is to out and out ban it, I wonder exactly what Dr. Thorpe beleives the proper government role for obesity ought to be.

BTW, MSNBC’s interactive Q&A on obesity still uses the CDC’s older, vastly overstated estimates.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 27th, 2005 at 5:38 pm 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.