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Comment by pb7 | Hacker News Reader

It's because Mississippi is the second most obese state at 40% of the pop. Healthcare can't fix that.

Preventative interventions can; preventing obesity falls under the purview of healthcare departments like the NHS.

But neither private insurance nor hospitals have any incentive to operate preventatively because insurance can just increase premiums and everybody happily makes more money... Some might observe how that also increases the GDP...

Eli Lilly may have a different point of view on that!

Actual health care can fix obesity.

The USA doesn't do much of that though. It prefers medical care.

(E.g., adding a dose-dependent sin tax on food-like substances with added sugar, subsidizing real food for those on SNAP. Unpopular because who doesn't want their simple carbs?)

I dont think paternalism raises quality of life. If Mississippians want to live short, fat lives I dont see the problem.

They don't want to, any more than someone who steps into traffic carelessly wants to have a broken hip (albeit on a different time scale). That's a stunningly paternalistic view.

I dont think the people in mississippi who are fat want to have diets that are comparable to french ones. I also think shame and peer pressure play a large role in keeping people from getting fat and personally find that a terrible way to run a society. Of course, all else equal, almost no one wants to be fat, but all else is not equal.

> USA doesn't do much of that

America does a lot of that, often quite well. It just isn’t provisioned equally, geographically or class-wise.

I prefer forced beatings in the town square

I honestly don't understand this statement. What else besides healthcare could fix that? Are you arguing that Mississippi obesity is due to genetics and cannot be changed?

The only other thing I can think of that would affect state wide obesity is food security and quality. Proper healthcare would be my first pick for fixing obesity.

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