Comment by tlb
9 years ago
Seat belts and many other automotive safety improvements were driven by insurance companies. That's a fortunate case of incentives being aligned.
It's surprising that health insurers aren't more vocal about sugar. Diabetes and obesity are expensive for them.
Follow the money, I'll bet you dollars to donuts there's a reason for it... like executives having conflicting interests that result in either direct or indirect financial stakes in or hidden kickbacks from the sugar industry.
Companies of these sizes have departments that are aware of the entire picture and everything is scripted, choreographed and quite deliberate - except when it serves their purpose to play dumb: "Hey DOJ, <sheepishly> we're real sorry, but we weren't aware of this massive conflict of interest that we made billions off! Please, take this $50m (from our $958m profit) as our mea culpa and divide it up between to 284 million people it affected as our way of saying sorry, we fucked up."
I'm sad now.