The US has a significant higher percentage of obese people[1] than the EU countries they combined. Obesity is known to be a significant risk factor for a large number of health issues[2].
Eyeballing an average of 25% obesity among the EU countries with the US having 36%, means the US has 44% more obese people per capita.
While that doesn't explain all of it, it surely is a significant contributing factor.
Not if those lives are ending due to extreme medical conditions. From a costing perspective there's not a big difference if you spend the last 5 years of your life in critical care at age 72 vs. 85
Reducing obesity is part of our public health goals in Europe though, so the fact we have lower obesity in universal health system countries is likely not entirely an accident.
Obesity is a failure of preventive healthcare - more like a consequence than a cause of inefficiency, lower coverage and higher spending. And prevention doesn’t start at doctor‘s office.
it's also a symptom of extreme poverty. Very few people in the US starve to death but they certainly don't get healthy diets, the capacity to exercise and the education & access needed to control obesity.
How does this compare to European smoking? In Europe there are a lot more smokers than last time I checked in the US. Smoking causes similar health issues as obesity, mainly cardiovascular events.
If the US could improve their food, or Europe could get rid of smoking, it would be a big jump in health outcomes for either.
I think obesity probably explains a lot of the cost difference which is why people are so excited about drugs like Ozempic. It may make financial sense for the government to cover the cost for everyone since it could end up lowering overall healthcare costs by a significant amount.
Surely food companies will just stand idly by as their revenues drop 20-30%
Surely they wouldn’t figure out a way to produce even less nutritious, less satiating, more flavorful (and therefore calorically dense) foods, would they?
Well i feel like that's only good up to a point right? We can legislate the extremely unhealthy stuff like we have started already. Public information campaigns are making more and more people vegetarian and vegan or at least some reduced-shit diet, healthy at every size and the fat acceptance movement fell flat on its face and was replaced with the much more healthy imaged body positivity movement. And what are they gonna do, make our chips literally dripping in bacon grease? Honestly might be better for us than the insane amounts of sugar they put in things these days. I hesitate to say this but, how much worse can it really get?
Removing food stamps and just giving people money instead is a good start. Poor people without food stamps are healthier than poor people with food stamps, so I don't see any reason to keep that system, it seems to just encourage poor people to buy too much junk food.
With hundreds of billions of dollars per year on the line? I’m certainly open to arguments as to how it can’t get worse, but that’s a pretty obscene incentive to make it worse.
No, but at some point there will be a reckoning just like with cigarettes and alcohol. Garbage food won't go away, but the individual and societal costs will eventually be recognized.
If we had pills you could take that would mitigate most of the downsides of cigarettes and alcohol, then no we wouldn’t. Then the question would be whether cigarette and alcohol manufacturers could innovate their way around those mitigations. I don’t know that’s possible with cigarettes, alcohol, or food, but food especially it seems very possible.
Also cigarettes and alcohol don’t crowd out healthier alternatives on retail shelves the way that unhealthy foods crowd out healthier ones.
People already take all sorts of drugs forever, and it's only designer today. There are other similar drugs in development, so cost will come down.
Drugs like Ozempic don't just work on obesity, but they look like they may also work on addiction in general. There's also the second order healthcare costs of obesity that people don't think about - knee replacements for example. I think you're underestimating how much money would be saved in healthcare by reducing obesity rates.
So it’s probably shaving off a few years of the most medically expensive parts of a person’s life.