Want To Cut Health Care Costs Then Lighten Up

(click on image to enlarge)
TW: The graph portrays the growth rate over the past 5 years in health care costs by "weight" levels. The point is obvious- we can improve efficiency, expand coverage, ration, whatever but if Americans insist on getting fatter and fatter then costs are going to go up. There are more variables, as Klein outlines, involved but if we as a society want to curb health care costs, then cutting weight would be one of the most powerful changes. Weight based cost incentives might be extremely relevant.

From Ezra Klein at WaPo:
"...That data, which comes from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, looks a bit more straightforward than it necessarily is. You're not just seeing sicker individuals in there. You're also seeing the financial incentives of overtreatment, the advance of medical technology, a lot of wasteful interventions, a system that overspends for every unit of care purchased, and so on and so forth. You're also seeing demographic correlations: Obesity is a particular problem among poor and minority communities, both of whom tend to be sicker.
But for all those caveats, you're also seeing sicker individuals in there. This is, after all, what the health-care system was built so to do: Find sick people and do expensive stuff to make them less sick. Which is a good reminder that not all of the health-care spending's problems can be solved by changing the ways hospitals do business. Some of them will have to be solved by making us less sick.."