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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Well, one clear market-based solution would be pricing transportation appropriately. If people were allowed to not pay for car infrastructure (via parking minimums, restrictive zoning, taxpayer-funded highways, etc. et.) and take their bike and train instead there would be a strong price signal to encourage the healthier activity.

I moved to the Netherlands a year ago and have already lost 9kg (about 20 pounds) without really even trying that hard. I just don't have a car.

It's even more baffling we don't do this because this is cheaper AND healthier. If the same organisation is paying for health care and transport (like a national government) than it should be a blindingly obvious solution.

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About half of the people United States are on government supplied medical insurance, and most of the people in other countries are on some version of that.

It is cheaper for people to die younger and so we should be encouraging unhealthy habits if we want to minimize medical care costs.

In spite of it's near ubiquity, I am trying to avoid the phrase "health care" because that is, as another comment talked about, not really what we do.

Looking at car ownership rates in the US over time and comparing to hypertension rates over time there doesn't seem to be much correlation.

I'm surprised I need to say this on HN, but you can't make inferences from this sort of uncontrolled choose-your-own-correlation-adventure in a whole population over time because thousands of things have changed in the population over that time.

If this were your epistemic standard, you'd have to accept all sorts of absurd or conflicting conclusions.

When someone is suggesting that a particular thing is causing or partly causing a particular outcome it is not a choose-your-own-correlate-adventure to look at how prevalence of that thing and that outcome have changed over time.

Things tend to be affected by their causes (!) so when the outcome is changing significantly and the purported cause is not then it suggests more evidence needs to be offered before we accept that the purported cause actually has a significant affect.

There is like a multi decade lag between walking less and health issues. There's no way you're going to see correlations like that.

Hell I doubt you will even see much correlation between car ownership rates and miles driven in a car or walking distances but at least that's a correlation that you might possibly see in data.

This policy would be too unrelated to health.

You can have a sedentary person who works from home and orders takeaways.

You can have a person who has a car who goes to gym 4 times per week, hikes during weekends and plays tennis 2 times per week and eats healthy food.

There is no reason to tax the second person more than the first one.

Well, we're talking about population-level health here, not individuals. And, in general, places where it's easier to get around using your own body have healthier people. Our current tax policy actively disincentivizes this - literally collecting _less_ tax could result in better health outcomes if it meant narrower, safer streets (which are cheaper to build and maintain), less parking (parking spots can cost tens of thousands of USD/EUR depending on where they are, and more insidiously, often displace housing), etc.

Public policies are designed to work on populations, massive number of people - not anecdotal evidences like these.

And taxing private transportation / providing incentives for public transportation does not only benefit our health, it also bring other benefits; global warming issues, dependency on fossil fuels, etc

From the health perspective I agree, but there's a pretty clear reason to tax the second person more, since they have a car: more emissions, road use, infrastructure costs etc.

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