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Comment by assblaster | Hacker News Reader

Actually that's not that bad for the United States since the obesity rate in the US is 4x that of Norway.

If the US got its obesity rate under control, we could save a lot of money (less hypertension, less diabetes).

The US health care system is a very well run billing machine with average (compared to other developed nations) health outcomes as a lucky side-effect.

I pay $6000+/year in health insurance in the US + deductibles + co-pays + + + and I don't even know if they'll cover me when shit really hits the fan - but hey, I'll get a flu shot "for free".

Check profit margins for companies in the health care space, they're pretty good.

Do you have any studies that you can point to that support this view? It’s OK if you can’t or don’t. I’ve heard this point of view often but it doesn’t jive with my anecdotal experience.

Diabetes and hypertension both increase the risks of coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease, renal disease, peripheral vascular disease, blindness, heart chamber enlargement and failure, localized infections, decreased wound healing requiring increased post-op surveillance and complications, obstructive sleep apnea (obesity) and its associated problems including pulmonary hypertension and heart failure.

As you can see, obesity is a leading risk for all these problems.

We need to fix obesity.

Yes we’d save a lot of money but do you have studies to show that fixing obesity would mean that we’d spend much less per capita on healthcare than we currently do? And by much less I mean get to Norway levels of per capita spending on healthcare.

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