The Price of Obesity
Next time someone laughs at the lawsuits against fast food companies and Oreo cookies, point them in this direction. The cost in health care dollars of obesity is America is about $93 billion, with about half being picked up by Medicare and Medicaid. According to the authors of the report, this amount approaches the cost of smoking. This particular study only looks at the health care costs related to obesity, so it does not include other costs of obesity, such as productivity losses due to worker lost days, etc. In addition, it does not consider other, more efficient uses of that almost $100 billion, such as prenatal care, research into infectious diseases, etc. (note: this is an amount just over what Dean's health care plan costs)