Just A Summary : Fat is an economic issue

Comment on Fat is an economic issue by Codepope

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 03:34:02 -0500

You do realise you just reworked the economic argument for smoking? Just saying.

Comment on Fat is an economic issue by brendadada

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 03:43:47 -0500

You knew there was a BUPA gym membership ad in the banner under that post, right?

(bastards)

Comment on Fat is an economic issue by codepope

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 03:50:51 -0500

Oh, and I’d better mention that what the model appears to omit, concentrating on health care costs, is the economic activity of people over their lifetime; a shorter lifetime translates to less economic activity which translates to less money to fund healthcare and the non healthcare costs incurred.

And I say that as a fat bloke who smokes, who exercises and eats sensibly (and losing weight).

Comment on Fat is an economic issue by Piers Cawley

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 05:03:33 -0500

Reworking the economic argument for smoking: Yeah, the study linked did the maths on smoking and smokers came out even cheaper. What it didn’t factor in was the cost of secondary cancer. As a fat person I’m unlikely to infect anyone with my obesity or diabetes. If I were a smoker and smoked in public, then I could be contributing to some non smoker’s cancer.

Economic activity: Once you hit retirement, you’re essentially economically inactive anyway – living off the earnings you salted away while you were working. Peg out early and you spend less time inactive on a pension. This does rather depend on how you account for the time you spend as a kid…

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that the issue is not as black and white as it’s often presented – the complexities of economic activity don’t make things any less blurred.

Bupa ad: Time to hit the adwords blocker again…

Comment on Fat is an economic issue by giles bowkett

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 05:45:49 -0500

All this might be true, but by the same logic, teenage suicides save taxpayers money. I don’t think cutting off healthcare for the overweight is sane, the overweight face serious medical risks, I know because I had some serious medical problems related to my own weight problems. I’ve been working on losing weight for years and I really only relatively recently brought it down below the obesity threshhold.

Anyway, your argument makes a certain amount of sense, but I think the risk of cutting fat people out of the British healthcare system has got to be low. Then again when my uncle told me what they replaced British Rail with, I thought he was joking. But what I’m really saying here is that defending your right to healthcare under the British system is all well and good, but if you’re fat, the most logical response over the long term is to find some way to become not fat, especially since, as you’ve pointed out, being fat limits your life expectancy.

It might be very difficult to get from 346 to 200, which is probably your target weight given your height, but it’s pretty easy to get from 346 to 340, and it would probably cost you as much energy as this debate, or less. If being fat diminishes your life expectancy, losing fat must increase it, so even losing just 6 pounds is worth doing. It’s not for me to tell people what to do, and there are many highly intelligent people who are overweight, but if you’re going to go on about it, let me tell you, plain and simple, there’s only one logical response when you know you’re not in a healthy condition, which is to target a healthy condition and then attain it.

I usually don’t get into this, because losing weight involves psychological matters like self-image, and most ideas on psychology are BS, but I’m trained in hypnosis and I’ll tell you, it’s easy to change your self-image. All you do is practice visualizing images and then work on visualizing images of your self. Do that often, deliberately, and after a while it becomes habit. All the stuff they BS about in the psychology industry, like what self-image “means,” it’s just time-consuming, meaningless chatter. You can disregard it as noise. To change your self-image, do visualization exercises, and visualize yourself looking different. That’s all there is to it. Use that on your weight issues and you’ll lose weight. I know because I’ve done it. At MountainWest RubyConf I was walking around holding my pants up with my hands because I had shrank, while the size of my pants had stayed constant, and I had foolishly failed to plan for this eventuality by packing a belt.

Anyway, long story short, this is my opinion: your obesity threatens your own life. Tune out anybody attacking you for it, fight to retain your healthcare, but make losing weight a priority, and do it.

Comment on Fat is an economic issue by Codepope

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 05:52:12 -0500

“Secondary smokers” – A case could be made that there is a “social infection” route in the normalisation of obesity that could have similar effects to that of secondary smoking.

“Once you hit retirement” – that assumes that people manage to make it that far and the assumption that retirement age is a cut off for economic activity (it isn’t; retired persons are still taxed and economically active all be it at a lower rate).

And why block the BUPA ad? Wasn’t your point about personal choice?

Comment on Fat is an economic issue by Joe

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:18:29 -0500

Oh please, the only useful measure is annual healthcare costs, which as you can see from the paper, was below both smokers and the overweight regardless of age.

The worthlessness of the argument is shown when taken to its logical conclusion, which is that the best health-care bargain is to be still born.

Comment on Fat is an economic issue by Piers Cawley

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:16:19 -0500

Giles: Oh, I’m working on getting the weight down as it seems to be about the only effective way of dealing with being type II diabetic. I’m down about 7 pounds from when I was diagnosed and the trend is in the right direction, albeit slow.

Codepope: Frankly, I’m thinking of removing all the advertising from the site. It’s not like I’m earning a fortune from it and it’s depressingly inappropriate most of the time. I’m certainly not happy about carrying ads for a parasite like Bupa.

Joe: I’m not sure that cost/year is the only useful measure – it’s certainly not obvious to me that it is. As for the best bargain being still birth, well, it depends doesn’t it? What’s the average cost of counseling the parents who lose the baby? Was the fetus the result of IVF? Worst bargain probably has to be pegging out at 16.

Of course it’s ludicrous. Money is a truly shitty yardstick for measuring any person, but the people who argue for denying treatment to the obese, smokers, drinkers, junkies, AIDS sufferers and the like tend to dress up their bigotry in financial terms: “I can’t believe that my taxes are paying for…” so I see no harm in offering a financial argument in reply.

Our taxes pay for worse things than caring for everyone regardless of their circumstances. Christ knows how much Viagra, insulin, ventolin, malaria research and drugs rehabilitation therapy we could support with the money we’re pouring into Iraq.

Comment on Fat is an economic issue by Spacemonkey

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:30:05 -0500

Got a really interesting perspective on this from my brother-in-law while he was visiting us recently. He was talking about how in some countries they are thinking about calculating health costs similar to auto insurance – divining who is a “high risk” and giving them high rates to offset that risk. Overweight, smoking, bad genes, whatever translates to higher costs, and therefore should be higher insurance premiums.

At first, I was in total agreement. I mean, if you are a higher risk then you should pay a higher rate, right?

Then he exposed me for the simple-minded fool that I was, by pointing out the negative effect of singling individuals out of the community, for whatever reason. His thinking is that everyone can share the load evenly, and fairly; and overall it will not make certain people feel like they are not wanted as part of the community.

In a sense, he’s preaching tolerance and inclusion, something that this world is sorely lacking in nowadays.

Comment on Fat is an economic issue by Drbob

Fri, 16 May 2008 12:00:50 -0500

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7404268.stm

Interesting read.