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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

> both are on SSID from obesity related issues.

It's remarkable to me that people can collect SSID from diseases that are preventable without even needing medical treatment. That seems... wrong. As someone who's gone through substantial weight loss before, I know it's challenging, but at the very least the government should require people getting SSI for obesity-related issues to go to food addiction counseling or something.

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"It's remarkable to me that people can collect SSID from diseases that are preventable without even needing medical treatment. That seems... wrong."

You might be interested to learn that in the United States, recipients of food benefits (food stamps) can use those benefits to buy things like soft drinks and candy bars.

This is true but I think a lot of obesity issues in this country, especially among the poor, are in large part due to the strange way food is subsidized. It is just cheaper to eat badly and while exercise and what not obviously matters the quality of affordable food is just very very low with large amounts of sugar and sodium making obesity and diet based diseases a lot more common.

Obesity itself isn't an allowable condition (it was, but then was later removed). I assume they are getting approved through potentially related problems like diabetes, back pain, etc. Probably too slippery a slope to automatically decline based on BMI. I suppose your idea of education makes sense though.

Eh. Most research shows that only 10% of people succeed in losing weight in the long term once they are morbidly obese. The only thing that seems to work is bariatric surgery.

SSDI eligibility is based on not where you can do a job or not; but whether you can do a job that's available locally or not.

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