I read yesterday in my trusty WSJ that the CDC may have overstated the number of deaths that could have been prevented if people hadn't been obese. The problem appears to be related to the way the CDC adjusted for "age and other factors." Still, they said, obesity firmly remains the second most prevalent cause of preventable deaths in the US, after smoking but before alcohol.
Studies like this must be incredibly difficult to design and execute. Since we'll all die sooner or later, attributing a single cause to a death is all but impossible. Nobody dies of obesity - they die of complications caused by obesity, such as heart disease, diabetes, etc. And since obesity isn't exactly a binary condition either, we're trying to correlate two elusive figures to come up with an exact number. This is further complicated by the fact that medical science is constantly coming up with new ways to extend the lives of obese and sick people - better treatment for diabetes, new ways to treat heart disease, medicine against hypertension, cholesterol, etc.)
The CDC publishes such numbers because they're easy to understand. If 800,000 (or whatever the number is) people hadn't been obese last year, they would have survived the year.
This may seem heartless, but it seems to me that a more interesting number would be what the economic cost is of obesity and smoking. What with medical costs spiraling out of control, you have to wonder whether a large amount of that goes to extending the lives of people with really unhealthy habits. There are also indirect costs related to lost work hours, welfare, disability and other transfer payments, orphaned and disadvantaged children, etc.
Health insurance companies now have the right to not pick up people who have "existing conditions" that they can't help, e.g., asthma, congenital heart disease, and other problems that have a genetic or accidental cause. This defeats the principle of solidarity that underlies all insurance schemes. But preventable conditions is another matter.
At the end of the day, people have the right to smoke and eat too much. But we should also have the right not to pay for their folly. Perhaps there should be a tax or health care rebate for individuals who show up every quarter and prove that their weight is within reason and they're not smoking. Such a rebate would definitely pay for my yoga classes.
Of course obesity has become one of the world fastest growing public health problems.
Posted by: Andrew Spark | January 31, 2006 at 04:04 AM