Obesity driving rising US health costs

"The United States spends twice as much as European countries on health care," noted lead researcher Kenneth Thorpe, chairman of the department of health policy and management at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. "Seventy-five percent of what we spend in this country is associated with patients that have one or more chronic conditions and most of the growth is due to obesity." More hysteria about fat causing disease.

"We have got to find more effective means to reduce, and at the worst, stabilize this persistent rise in obesity among adults and kids in this country," he said. Good luck, they haven't found a way to do that yet.

They report that about 17 percent of European adults are obese, compared with around a third of American adults. In addition, 53 percent of adult Americans are either former or current smokers, compared with 43 percent of those in Europe. American adults were also more likely than Europeans to have heart disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung disease -- all associated with obesity and/or smoking. Smoking, maybe (never heard of smoking causing diabetes, but maybe they mean all the others are caused by smoking and fat, and diabetes alone is caused by fat). Yeah, right, I don't think so people.

If the prevalence of obesity could be reduced (and along with it, chronic disease), Thorpe's team estimates that health spending could be cut by $100 billion to $150 billion per year, trimming up to 18.7 percent off the nation's total health-care budget.
Thorpe believes the only way to get health-care costs under control is to find ways to reduce obesity. "There is a lack of an effective primary-care system in this country," he said. "We have to manage patients with chronic conditions more effectively, and we have got to find a way to prevent this rise in obesity." As I said before, Good Luck finding a way to get rid of fat. How many WLDs have been tried, how many pills have been created, and how many of them have worked permanently? Hmmmmm?

"I'm not sure obesity is a medical condition that lends itself to medical treatment," said Greg Scandlen, the founder of Consumers for Health Care Choices, a health-care lobbying group. "Certainly, it does suggest the need for more exercise and better diets, but that is a grandmother's advice. Do we need highly trained and expensive professionals telling people what grandmothers have told them for free for generations?" He's not sure it's a medical condition that lends itself to medical treatment? Then why do doctors push pills, and diets, and WLS? Those are all medical treatments, and we've seen how well they work to permanently get rid of TEH FAT.

I have a message for doctors: You are not GOD! Yes, you have a responsibility to relieve pain and suffering, but that does NOT give you the right to decide who is healthy and who is not. It does NOT give you the right to push medical treatments that have proved to be ineffective for 90% of the fat people you treat and in some cases, make those people sicker than they were before you treated them. Remember your oath: First, do NO harm. You had better realize that standards were never meant to be applied to human beings. Standards are fine for quality control in manufacturing, but people are too complex and diverse for anyone to demand that all people can meet one standard of health. Health is NOT one-size-fits-all, health is specific to each individual, and that individual has the right to decide his/her own level of health. It is not a moral imperative to be reached.