June 16, 2009--Obesity at $4.98 a Pound
If it is true as Barack Obama has been claiming as he flies around the country to promote healthcare reform that at least half of what Americans spend each year on medical treatment is associated with controllable and thus preventable behavior—smoking and obesity—than I have a simple solution for those 58 million of us who are overweight and the other 40 million who are obese:
By the pound, the government should pay people to lose weight.
Here’s how it would work and how much it would cost . . . and then save—
First, the magnitude of the problem. Being overweight or obese is not just a matter of how one looks or being stigmatized by a society in which celebrities flaunt their svelteness. It is correlated with serious, life-threatening illnesses. 80 percent of Type II diabetes is related to obesity, 70% of cardiovascular disease, 42% of breast and colon cancer, 30% of gall bladder surgery, and 26% of obese people have high blood pressure.
All of these are lifelong afflictions, causing people to seek frequent medical treatment, have expensive tests, take equally expensive medication, and wind up frequently in hospitals. The bottom line for this, the direct and indirect costs associated with this care is at least $117 billion a year.
Now, the “solution.”
Pay people $4.98 for every pound they lose and offer them annual bonuses for every pound that they keep off. I like $4.98 because that’s about what it costs to buy a pound of basic chopped meat in the supermarket.
If my plan were to work and everyone who is overweight (if you are 5 feet 9 inches tall and weigh 25 pounds more than is recommended, you are overweight) or obese (this would mean that at that height on average you weigh 50 pounds more than is considered to be a healthy weight), with 58 million overweight and 40 million obese, that means that Americans are carrying around 3.45 billion more pounds than they should.
At my $4.98 a pound, minus the administrative cost of the program, it would cost taxpayers “only” $17.18 billion dollars for the initial weight loss if everyone who is either overweight or obese were to lose all the weight necessary for them to reach their healthy weight. That’s just 15 percent of what we are currently spending each year for those who are heavier than is considered healthy.
How would this program be administered? One suggestion is that every post office and school in America would include a simple weight loss facility. Basically, a digital scale that would be connected to a national database that would keep track of how everyone participating is doing and send checks each month to those losing weight.
To get started you would go to your local post office and literally weigh in. The system would determine a healthy weight for you, based on your height, age, and starting weight—in effect your target. You would be assigned a registration number and be asked to pick a password. The scale would then issue you a smart card—like those used in many mass transit systems—that you would insert in the machine each time you came back to a PO or school anywhere in the country. At each subsequent weigh-in that card would keep track of your progress and you would get paid for shedding pounds only until your reached you goal.
If after the first month you lost, hopefully, five or so pounds you’d receive a check in the mail for $24.90.
Since almost all, after the huge effort required to lose weight, in a year tend to regain most of it, this program would reward those who keep the weight off. So, to monitor and reward maintaining a healthy weight, after reaching their goal, people would be encouraged to check in every three months or so; and if they were shown to retain their weight loss, the system would send them checks for up to $50 annually.
If everyone lost all the weight required for everyone to reach a healthy weight and everyone kept all of that weight off, it would cost taxpayers only $4.9 billion a year to sustain the results of all the effort. Again, much less than the current $117 billion that it costs us to treat illnesses related to being significantly overweight.
And this is not to mention the increases in productivity of workers nor the improvements in well being and lifestyle that millions would experience.
I do not know how to quantify the costs of setting up and running this program. We’d need to invest in developing the smart scales, the smart cards, the data system, ways to reduce cheating, and of course the costs associated with maintaining the system and issuing checks. I suspect most of the ongoing administrative work could be automated. So let’s err on the conservative side and say it would cost another $2.0 billion a year to make this work. Still, we would save a fortune and have a much happier and healthy citizenry.
And then as another form of bonus we’d all look better in our bathing suits!
By the pound, the government should pay people to lose weight.
Here’s how it would work and how much it would cost . . . and then save—
First, the magnitude of the problem. Being overweight or obese is not just a matter of how one looks or being stigmatized by a society in which celebrities flaunt their svelteness. It is correlated with serious, life-threatening illnesses. 80 percent of Type II diabetes is related to obesity, 70% of cardiovascular disease, 42% of breast and colon cancer, 30% of gall bladder surgery, and 26% of obese people have high blood pressure.
All of these are lifelong afflictions, causing people to seek frequent medical treatment, have expensive tests, take equally expensive medication, and wind up frequently in hospitals. The bottom line for this, the direct and indirect costs associated with this care is at least $117 billion a year.
Now, the “solution.”
Pay people $4.98 for every pound they lose and offer them annual bonuses for every pound that they keep off. I like $4.98 because that’s about what it costs to buy a pound of basic chopped meat in the supermarket.
If my plan were to work and everyone who is overweight (if you are 5 feet 9 inches tall and weigh 25 pounds more than is recommended, you are overweight) or obese (this would mean that at that height on average you weigh 50 pounds more than is considered to be a healthy weight), with 58 million overweight and 40 million obese, that means that Americans are carrying around 3.45 billion more pounds than they should.
At my $4.98 a pound, minus the administrative cost of the program, it would cost taxpayers “only” $17.18 billion dollars for the initial weight loss if everyone who is either overweight or obese were to lose all the weight necessary for them to reach their healthy weight. That’s just 15 percent of what we are currently spending each year for those who are heavier than is considered healthy.
How would this program be administered? One suggestion is that every post office and school in America would include a simple weight loss facility. Basically, a digital scale that would be connected to a national database that would keep track of how everyone participating is doing and send checks each month to those losing weight.
To get started you would go to your local post office and literally weigh in. The system would determine a healthy weight for you, based on your height, age, and starting weight—in effect your target. You would be assigned a registration number and be asked to pick a password. The scale would then issue you a smart card—like those used in many mass transit systems—that you would insert in the machine each time you came back to a PO or school anywhere in the country. At each subsequent weigh-in that card would keep track of your progress and you would get paid for shedding pounds only until your reached you goal.
If after the first month you lost, hopefully, five or so pounds you’d receive a check in the mail for $24.90.
Since almost all, after the huge effort required to lose weight, in a year tend to regain most of it, this program would reward those who keep the weight off. So, to monitor and reward maintaining a healthy weight, after reaching their goal, people would be encouraged to check in every three months or so; and if they were shown to retain their weight loss, the system would send them checks for up to $50 annually.
If everyone lost all the weight required for everyone to reach a healthy weight and everyone kept all of that weight off, it would cost taxpayers only $4.9 billion a year to sustain the results of all the effort. Again, much less than the current $117 billion that it costs us to treat illnesses related to being significantly overweight.
And this is not to mention the increases in productivity of workers nor the improvements in well being and lifestyle that millions would experience.
I do not know how to quantify the costs of setting up and running this program. We’d need to invest in developing the smart scales, the smart cards, the data system, ways to reduce cheating, and of course the costs associated with maintaining the system and issuing checks. I suspect most of the ongoing administrative work could be automated. So let’s err on the conservative side and say it would cost another $2.0 billion a year to make this work. Still, we would save a fortune and have a much happier and healthy citizenry.
And then as another form of bonus we’d all look better in our bathing suits!
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:48 AM
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