Whole New Meaning For “Cost Of Living”

Recent news offers a whole new meaning to the phrase cost of living. It would be hilarious, except that people are deadly serious. Let me deconstruct.

Yahoo News headline (February 5, 2008) proclaims: “Fat people cheaper to treat, study says.” The article reports a Dutch study showing that “preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn’t save money.”

You view the original study published online and note the second half of the title: “Prevention [of obesity] No Cure for Increasing Health Expenditure.” Fascinated by the authors’ apparent implication that we shoulld not bother preventing obesity, you read on. Obesity prevention costs money and if it works, the formerly fat people live longer, which also costs money. Eventually, you discover the article’s key message: non-smoking, non-obese people spend even more healthcare dollars because, get this, they are living longer.

Isn’t that the whole point?!

For a lecture many years ago, I prepared the graphic below. It speaks for itself. Taken to its logical and ridiculous endpoint, the cheapest answer to all medical problems is death.

This Post was not written to assign blame to: Yahoo News; researchers at the National Institute for Public Health in the Netherlands; fat people or thin folks; chain smokers or marathon runners. Fault lies with a system that measures only short-term costs. Our healthcare system does not even try to determine VALUE: the cost/benefit ratio. Until we measure our gain from health care, all we know is our loss, which is cost. We have heard over and over that reducing cost is invariably a good thing.

Measuring healthcare costs only leads us to kill anyone who is sick.

System MD

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