Healthy People are the Biggest Burden to the Health Care System

 The funny thing about nanny state regulations, I guess I shouldn’t say funny, the thing about nanny state regulations is the fact that there is no end in sight to where the nanny staters will go next. We all know the chronological order with the latest victims being the overweight. I recently wrote a post about Mississippi lawmakers who are proposing a ban on overweight people in restaurants. Naturally, this would be for their own good, that’s what it is always about with the nanny staters. Protecting people from their unhealthy habits  and unsafe actions is what these people are all about.

 One of the reasons we often here when the nanny staters begin their bigoted, obesophobic, hate filled assault on the rights of the overweight is that besides being unhealthy the overweight become a burden on the healthcare system. We now here politicians rant that we need a healthcare system that focuses on preventative care to help keep the cost of healthcare down. The same is said of the smokers.

 Suddenly though comes this study, and it just shows us how these people will just run themselves into circles if you let them outside to play for too long.

There are a lot of good reasons for people to lose weight and stop smoking — but saving money on lifetime health care costs isn’t one of them, according to a study out of the Netherlands.

The researchers found that healthy people cost governments more in the long run because they live years longer: an average of 4.5 years longer than people who are obese, and seven years longer than smokers.

Economist Pieter van Baal, who led the study for the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, talks with Melissa Block about the counter-intuitive idea that a healthy lifestyle costs more in terms of health care.

Van Baal’s study, “Lifetime Medical Costs of Obesity: Prevention No Cure for Increasing Health Expenditure,” was published Monday in the online journal Public Library of Science-Medicine.

 Now we find out that healthy people cause more of a burden on the healthcare system than do smokers and overweight people. Where do we go from here? People who do not smoke and who are in proper shape are now living too long and causing too much of a burden on the healthcare system.

 As I wrote in the first sentence, you can never tell where the next nanny state attack will be aimed next. Could they possible go after the healthy for their own good? Or at least “the common good”? Think about it, healthy people are selfishly living too long, thereby using healthcare money that would be better spent on the less fortunate overweight and smoking people.

 This is just hyperbole, but I use it to illustrate how any good news comes with a negative side with these people. The fact that you can live a longer, healthier life should be good news but they can not let it go at that. They have to step in and tell us how even living longer has drastic negative consequences. There is always a “yeah, but” with these people. Their negativity is what really pisses me off.

 On a side note, did we really need this study to tell us that healthy people live longer than unhealthy people?