Healthy Cost More to Treat Than Smokers and the Obese

A study by the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and Environment has found that healthy people are more of a financial burden in medical costs than smokers and the obese. Holy moly!

The reason is that the healthy tend to live longer and so, while they might not have to battle lung cancer, heart disease or diabetes in their fifties, they may need long-term care for illnesses of old age such as Alzheimer's.

As a result, any "savings" made by them being healthy when young are more than offset by their being ill in old age.

Based on healthcare costs in Holland, where the study was conducted, a person of normal weight can expect their medical bills from the age of 20 to total £210,000 over the course of their lifetime, while an obese person's costs will be £187,000. Smokers, whose life expectancy is the shortest of the three, cost the least, at £165,000, the researchers from the National Institute for Public Health and Environment calculated.

Writing in the journal PLoS Medicine, the researchers said: "Obesity increases the risk of diseases such as diabetes, increasing healthcare utilisation but decreasing life expectancy.

"Unfortunately, these life-years gained are not lived in full health and come at a price: people suffer from other diseases which increases healthcare costs. The underlying mechanism is that there is a substitution of inexpensive, lethal diseases towards less lethal, and therefore more costly diseases."

Without health costs as a valid argument for outlawing smoking and obesity, one must wonder what the anti-smoking and food-police crowds will resort to as justification for taking away individual rights. Of course, the study most likely will be challenged by utopians.