Courtesy of Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds
That good health is insanely unprofitable was highlighted by a staggering statistic in the recent research paper The Concentration of Health Care Spending (via B.C.):
Mean annual spending for the bottom half of (the American population) distribution was just $236 per person, totaling only $36 billion for the entire group of more than 150 million people.
We don't know why the 150 million people did not consume much in the way of "health services"– they might have been healthy and had no need for healthcare beyond routine tests, or they might have needed care and been unable to afford it, despite the Orwellian-titled Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Here is an example of the insanity of U.S. healthcare costs. One of our European friends was doing post-doctorate research at a major U.S. university. His son suffered a minor burn in the kitchen, and on the doctor's recommendation, the parents took the toddler to a hospital a few days later to have the dressing–basically a piece of gauze taped over the burn–changed.
Naive to the absurdities and costs of U.S. healthcare, the parents followed these instructions rather than just changing the gauze themselves.
Their punishment for foolishly asking the medical establishment to spend 5 minutes changing a small piece of gauze: a bill for $875. The list of similar charges is equally absurd. Among those known to me first-hand: $120,000 for a few days in a hospital, no operation, not intensive care; $6,000 for 20 minutes sitting in an observation room after a minor outpatient surgery on the patient's big toe–the list is essentially endless.
Readers are quick to note that the charges may not be paid in full–but that is no defense of the system. So that makes it OK that Medicare is charged "only" $80,000 for a few days in a hospital bed, or "only" $5,000 for sitting in a room for 20 minutes?
Sadly, we know 90% of the American populace is not healthy. Rather, the 70% who are overweight are facing decades of ill-health and needlessly early deaths. Consider this report cited in America The Obese:
Published in the journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, a study comparing young men and women of healthy weights to young obese individuals found that those who were overweight lost about 8.4 years off of their lives if they were men and 6.1 years off of their lives if they were women.
Young obese men suffered 18.8 more years of poor health leading up to their early deaths compared to men of healthy weight, while young obese women suffered 19.1 years of poor health. Even when obesity emerged just in old age, both men and women were found to lose years off of their lives: for men, an average of 3.7 years and for women about 5.3 years.
Americans spend $60 billion annually on weight loss programs and products, yet we become more overweight every year. Note that this $60 billion is almost twice the amount spent on healthcare for 150 million Americans.
The weight gain may be linear in nature, but the adverse consequences of extra weight are geometric. As noted in New obesity guidelines help physicians and patients with weight loss treatments:
As our waistlines expand, so too do the number of medical problems caused by excess body weight. A 2012 report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “F as in Fat, How Obesity Threatens America’s Future,” found that if obesity rates continue on their current trajectories, the number of new cases of type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, hypertension, and arthritis could increase 10-fold between 2010 and 2020—and double again by 2030.
“As evidence unfolds, everyone is beginning to appreciate that obesity and excess body weight are driving medical conditions and costs. You cannot get medical costs under control as long as we have these rising rates of obesity,” says Donna Ryan, MD, professor emeritus at Pennington Biomedical Research Center at Louisiana State University Health System, and previous past president of The Obesity Society.
That America's ill health has become a national security risk is obvious: America: Too fat to fight.
