[rickbutton]

There should certainly be measurements taken, costs considered, alternatives approached when building our healthcare system. No one has ever implied otherwise, ever. To imply that there is some level of healthy after which it doesn't make sense to seek improvement is the dehumanizing and anti-social part. What is the point of building an economy at all if not to improve the lives of the population? Opinions in this thread already seem to be that "people are healthy enough, and if not, it is due to their own choices" rather than "we should carefully consider how to optimize this system for efficiency" while focusing on the actual goal of improving lives for the average person as well as those who need more healthcare.

[JumpCrisscross]

> imply that there is some level of healthy after which it doesn't make sense to seek improvement is the dehumanizing and anti-social part

No it's not. Every doctor triages. And every medical system has internal cost limits, whether implicit or implict, universal or variable, past which it will not treat. Sometimes that's enforced by gatekeeping entire categories of treatments; in other cases we have patients individually reviewed, e.g. for organ transplants.

If managing obesity is less expensive than treating it, there is a legitimate question around how the cost of that treatment should be split between the public and the individual. (Whether that cost be an explicit split or gatekeeping the treatment to only the most morbidly obese.) Thankfully, that's not the case--treating obesity, even chronically with super-expensive drugs, is still cheaper than the status quo.

[rickbutton]

Correct, doctors do triage according to need and available resources. When you imply that there is some category of care that doesn't deserve treatment (or is too "costly" to provide), you are triaging and choosing economic growth over healthcare. I think that it is a rational decision to make, although it is certainly not the one that has the most respect for human life.

[JumpCrisscross]

> When you imply that there is some category of care that doesn't deserve treatment (or is too "costly" to provide), you are triaging and choosing economic growth over healthcare

Yes, every medical system does this. (It's almost the defining difference between medicine and healthcare.)

America does it individually (and inefficiently). Europea by restricting access to expensive treatments. If you don't do this at some level, you'll wind up with edge cases constantly running up bills the economy can't pay for and a collapse of the healthcare system's solvency.