> is plenty of money with many orders of magnitude to spare
Putting infinite value on anything is a great way to incentivise a system that delivers little to none of it.
Putting infinite value on anything is a great way to incentivise a system that delivers little to none of it.
No it's not. Every doctor triages. And every medical system has internal cost limits, whether implicit or implict, universal or variable, past which it will not treat. Sometimes that's enforced by gatekeeping entire categories of treatments; in other cases we have patients individually reviewed, e.g. for organ transplants.
If managing obesity is less expensive than treating it, there is a legitimate question around how the cost of that treatment should be split between the public and the individual. (Whether that cost be an explicit split or gatekeeping the treatment to only the most morbidly obese.) Thankfully, that's not the case--treating obesity, even chronically with super-expensive drugs, is still cheaper than the status quo.
Yes, every medical system does this. (It's almost the defining difference between medicine and healthcare.)
America does it individually (and inefficiently). Europea by restricting access to expensive treatments. If you don't do this at some level, you'll wind up with edge cases constantly running up bills the economy can't pay for and a collapse of the healthcare system's solvency.