I found this last night and thought it was interesting considering the discussions we've had here about health care and issues involving weight and smoking.
Fat people are cheaper to treat...
A snip from the middle of the article
"Van Baal and colleagues created a model to simulate lifetime health costs for three groups of 1,000 people: the "healthy-living" group (thin and non-smoking), obese people, and smokers. The model relied on "cost of illness" data and disease prevalence in the Netherlands in 2003.
The researchers found that 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.
On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years, and obese people lived about 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease than the healthy people.
Cancer incidence, except for lung cancer, was the same in all three groups. Obese people had the most diabetes, and healthy people had the most strokes. Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.
The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000."
Look at that.. all you skinny, healthy people are the ones who will be a real drain on the system not us BBWs & BHMs.
Viv le chocolate!
i'd still rather be at a good weight, not smoking, and taking care of myself. yeah, i might have to pay for others who aren't, but at least i can possibly enjoy my kids and grandkids longer. that's the most important thing to me.
but the post was really pointing more at the posters who insist that it is overweight people who are the heaviest (no pun intended) burden financially on the system.
okayyyyyyyyyy? so live a couple decades less than me. i can live with that!
You know who have high health care costs? Sick people! If just stop providing coverage for them, we could save a lot of money in health care costs.
:)
hehehe I knew I could count on you to come up with a brilliant idea Sensor :Þ
...for the extra three years of life (on average) they lived because they didn't smoke. The healthy, non-smokers (on average) cost an extra $13,000 for each year beyond 77 (compared to the smokers), or an extra $11, 500 a year for the extra four years they lived on (on average) beyond their obese counterparts. On average, the obese cost $6,183.33 for each year of life for health care. The smokers cost $5,719.30 for each year of health care past 20, and the healthy, non-smokers cost $6,515.63 for health care each year past 20. I'm a patriot. Give me a cig and pass that 12 ounce steak, and mashed potatoes. I'll save the tax-payer some money, and die a happy man.
Keep in mind too, that this was a "study" using simulated people - not real people. Which makes all of it questionable to me. (and, fwiw -I am small, not skinny - I never, ever said that being skinny is healthy either,)