Who hurts the US Healthcare system worse?

As I showed you in a previous thread on this same subject, the obesity rate in the UK is nearly the same as the US, and yet they pay half as much per capita for health care in the UK as compared to the US. The reason for the massive cost of health care in the US is not obese people. It is the system of how we pay for health care that is the problem. The first thing we can do is keep non-emergencies out of the emergency room. A visit to a primary doc is a fraction of the cost for an emergency room visit. We can try to limit abuse of these programs, but I think we will all agree that we will never get rid of all the abuse. The next best thing is to limit the damage from that abuse.Under the ACA, people will be buying subsidized insurance which is only going to put fuel on the fire. This isn't going to get fixed until we have a single payer system. Period. Insurance companies will continue to collude with hospitals to keep prices high. On top of that, now insurance companies have no incentive to keep their premiums down since they will get money to subsidize premiums.

Not really. The skinny and well exercised 75 year old with leukemia is more of a burden than the 25 year old fat kid with no health problems. The fact of the matter is that no matter how well you take care of yourself you will probably still need very expensive care towards the end of your life. If being overweight doesn't get you, old age will. Does a guy who dies a 55 from a massive coronary cost more than a skinny 90 year old that took care of himself who has been fighting lupus for 10 years? No, he doesn't. I think you could make an argument that it is irresponsible, but we live in a free country where irresponsible is not illegal. I think it would be immoral to dole out health care based on whether or not you are obese. You might as well blame people for having a low income so that other high income earners have to support them. Should we also ban poor people from hospitals because they are a burden on the system?

It is still a healthcare system that we are paying into with tax money, just as with Medicaid. I don't know if this is completely true. I would actually be interested in seeing the statistics. I know a guy who was in awesome shape, ate right, all that stuff, and then he developed MS. He is probably going to be on life long disability, and he is just 35. I think it is more than fair to say that fit people have lower rates of disease, but just how much of a burden is it? I would also suspect that the majority of smoking related disease occurs after the age of 65.If people don't succumb to disease related to obesity or smoking, they will still probably succumb to some disease that requires a lot of money. Whether someone gets lung cancer at 55 from smoking or prostate cancer at 85 from just being old, the cost is the same. At some point we have to put responsibility in people's hands. The prohibition on alcohol and weed didn't work, so how do you think a prohibition on sugar and fat is going to work? If you ban bacon people will be after you with torches and pitchforks, and I may be leading the mob. So what do we do when they show up at the emergency room with an actual emergency? As of now, we do not allow hosptials to deny care to people in emergency rooms. Can you imagine if we DID run hospitals with the requirement that you have to have insurance in order to be admitted to the emergency room? People would be dying for no other reason than not having insurance.What happens when people without insurance and without income can not pay their emergency room bills? That cost gets passed on to us, the people who do pay for health insurance. We would be better off giving people the basic insurance they need without charge so that they can go to a primary doctor at a fraction of the cost. That's the harsh reality of the whole thing. We can talk about fairness, but we also need to be pragmatic about this.

My grandmother is 89 and she didn't drink, didn't smoke, ate right, and was never close to being obese. She worked outside every day and kept herself busy for as long as she could. She raised 5 kids on a 200 acre farm, and it certainly wasn't a lazy lifestyle.So how is she now? She is suffering from senility, inoperable lung cancer, arteriosclerosis, and constant vertigo. She requires a lot of health care. I would expect that if we most of us live long enough we will have a similar list of ailments no matter how much we exercised or how well we ate leading up to that point in our lives. Being old is just damn expensive.

I guess we should make some effort to ground our discussion in some facts. Found this paper that looked at 3.75 million people in 2000:"Per capita lifetime expenditure is $316,600, a third higher for females ($361,200) than males ($268,700). Two-fifths of this difference owes to women's longer life expectancy. Nearly one-third of lifetime expenditures is incurred during middle age, and nearly half during the senior years. For survivors to age 85, more than one-third of their lifetime expenditures will accrue in their remaining years."So health care costs are heavily tilted towards the twilight years, on average. I would rather see studies that demonstrate a link before pointing a finger, but I am not discounting it either. At the same time, life time expectancy has doubled over the last 200 years in first world nations while infant mortality and maternal mortality have dropped by 90%. Obviously, we are doing something right.

A quick google found these numbers:"Current estimates [for 2011] suggest that the yearly medical cost of adult obesity today is between $147 billion and $210 billion, the study said. The report found that by 2030, an extra $48 billion to $66 billion per year may be spent treating preventable diseases associated with obesity."
Health care costs to bulge along with U.S. waistlines | CNN"US healthcare costs in 2009 totaled about $2.8 trillion, according to [pdf] a new study from Deloitte."
US Healthcare Costs Approach $3T - Marketing ChartsThese are only 2 years apart, so they should be able to give us some numbers to work from.According to my quick math, obesity accounts for 10% of healthcare costs. Comparatively, seniors only make up just over a tenth of the population, yet they use over a third of the health care dollars:"Although seniors comprised 13% of the population, they incurred 36%, or a little more than $1 trillion, of total healthcare expenditures."
US Healthcare Costs Approach $3T - Marketing Charts

As I demonstrated in a previous post, obesity increases US healthcare costs by 10% while the elderly account for the largest portion of healthcare spending per capita. So are the obese and the elderly the true "burdens" of the healthcare system? No.Let's look at what is really costing us. It is the US healthcare system itself as shown by the fact that we pay 100% more than other first world nations. 100%. This is not due to higher obesity rates in the US. This is not due to a population tilted heavily towards older age groups. This is due to a for profit, private system that has had no incentive to keep prices down for the last 40 years. The real burden is the lack of socialist healthcare.

It will reduce costs by about 5% if we cut the obesity rate in half compared to a 50% savings that people in socialist countries are seeing because they have a better healthcare system.What is the real problem here?Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

If government buildings were gilded with gold in the same way that church buildings are, what would you say about it? Have you seen the Vatican?We tried the charity route during the Great Depression. It failed miserably. It was only through government intervention that people were saved from starvation, and the only way they found work through WPA programs. While people were starving the church was dusting their guilded halls. The cancer within the healthcare system is a for profit system that seeks profits over the financial future of citizens. About half of all bankruptcies are due to medical bills. We pay twice what other socialist countries pay for healthcare.

Other socialist countries are much more liberal than the US, and yet their healthcare costs are half of what ours is and violence is much lower, all with less religiosity than the US.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

However, it does not have a direct correlation to the cost of treating that person. Unfortunately, the same person being treated in the US will cost twice as much as the same person in the UK. As to the topic described in the title of this thread, it is the US healthcare system itself that hurts us the most. Obesity causes a very minor increase in costs compared to the doubling of costs produced by the system itself.

This really isn't the case (if my memory of physio isn't failing me). Our blood glucose stays pretty level, at least for non-diabetics. The liver is converts excess blood glucose into stored glycogen, and then releases that glycogen back into the blood stream when glucose gets low. Even if someone is completely sedentary you will still see an initial spike in blood glucose right after a meal that then moves back to a normal baseline within 2 hours. However, that glucose is made into glycogen and stored lipids which can be released back into the bloodstream at any point, even days later. If those glycogen stores from your last meal get low the the body will start to convert proteins (including those that make up your body) into glycogen, or use stored lipids to produce glycogen.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

I think there is a more important point here. Is our perception of "energy" a measure of the actual metabolic state in our muscles? Or is it a mental state produced by serotonin or other neurochemicals?

Everything I have read indicates that this is a very pervasive myth.

quote:

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If you're sluggish at 4pm, conventional wisdom says you're hypoglycemic. Your blood sugar's low, and some M&Ms will make those levels spike then plunge. But that line of thinking has as much truth as the Loch Ness legend, without even a grainy photo to back it up.

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"There's no evidence to support the idea that mid-afternoon tiredness is caused by hypoglycemia, or that healthy people feel normal fluctuations in blood sugar," says endocrinologist Dr Phillip Cryer. "The threshold for symptoms of low blood sugar is 50 to 55mg of glucose per deciliter [100ml] of blood, and it's very, very rare for a healthy person to get to those levels."
http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/...934302/instant-em-energy-em

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This makes a lot more sense from what learned in school and learned since. Blood sugar is highly regulated in the blood stream. If anything, exercise reduces insulin production and actually boosts glucose levels. Slow release of glucose into the blood stream doesn't make any difference.

It's a mixture of Chicken Littles, another excuse to bash Obama, and people following party orders.In the end, it is just a slightly different way to buy the same private health insurance that Americans have been buying for decades. That's it. As in the past, premiums are going to go up for some people, and down for others. This was the case before Obamacare, and it will continue to be the case.The only catastrophe in this whole thing is that they did not create socialized, single payer healthcare like you and our other good neighbors to the North have.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.