While reporting my column today on soda and obesity, I asked the economists at the Rand Corporation to estimate how much money obesity costs the federal government. They imagined that the American population was no more overweight than it had been in the 1980s and then analyzed how Medicare and Medicaid costs would be different in that situation. (They used a Rand economic model of theirs called the Future Elderly Model.)
The answer: $40 billion.
That’s a decent amount of money. It would pay about one-third the cost of health-care reform, for example. It is equal to about 6 percent of the total budget for Medicare and Medicaid.
Clearly, no set of public policies can return the nation’s obesity rate to its 1980s levels, at least not anytime soon. But it’s worth remembering that obesity brings a big cost, in both human and fiscal terms, and attacking obesity could pay real dividends.
Its time to tell Americans to take a hike... literally
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