Study finds healthy people have higher lifetime healthcare costs than obese people.
The AP (2/5, Cheng) reports that “[p]reventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn’t save money,” because “[i]t costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer,” according to a study published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine. Lead author Pieter van Baal, an economist at the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, 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.” This “model relied on ‘cost of illness’ data and disease prevalence in the Netherlands in 2003.” The authors “found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs.” Yet, “because both the smokers and the obese people died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.”

So, WTF? Being healthy is just a drain on the rest of us in society? Like Robert Earl Keen said, “it all comes down to livin’ fast or dyin’ slow”.