Comment by armchairhacker
4 hours ago
Why don’t governments pay for free GLPs for everyone overweight? They overrepay for themselves by reducing medical care.
4 hours ago
Why don’t governments pay for free GLPs for everyone overweight? They overrepay for themselves by reducing medical care.
It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.
We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids. Kids are driven to school instead of walking or biking. School lunches are optimized to be cheap not nutritious. Pediatricians have to tap dance around weight. When the Obama Administration tried to push for healthier lunches there was pushback from the right over government bad, from industry over higher costs, and from school districts over costs. Healthier food for kids could not win a durable political coalition!
> It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.
Is it? GLPs cost literally pennies to manufacture in bulk. The government could easily justify a trillion to just buy the rights and give it away for free and still come out ahead on healthcare cost savings.
Everything your suggesting sounds like a lot of work by comparison.
Why not both? Because we’ve been “addressing on the front end” for a while without results. Making places walkable and getting (especially already obese) kids onto healthy food are things we should be doing, but need more support and take longer than a drug, which admittedly has side effects but seems healthier than waiting.
And Obama’s healthier lunches received pushback because they had some stupid requirements, like reducing salt intake, and poor implementation: maybe not Obama’s fault, but should’ve been addressed, IME students were forced to take a fruit or vegetable they would just throw away, and sometimes the “fruit” were these gross bananas that were simultaneously green and brown/mushy. They also received pushback from kids themselves and their parents.
> We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids.
The government is also heavily subsidizing corn, which made corn syrup the cheapest sweetener.
Hell, let's just reduce the Medicare eligibility age (alllll the way down) so everyone can afford the care they need or would benefit from.
Medicare is currently something like 14% of the budget and covers 20% of the population.
The least healthiest 20% of the population. Old people use much more medical care.
to be fair if everyone was paying 10-20k less in private healthcare thorough their employer you could tax that amount
There is no value for a government in long-term thinking, if the electorate only votes on short term issues.
This may be true, but I think the electorate would go fucking bananas for free GLP-1s.
Why only GLP? Same logic can be applied to all preventive care
True, but GLPs in particular are obvious.
Because the political will doesn't exist. Because being fat is portrayed as a moral failing. Because the Protestant work ethic's[1] virtue of self-discipline extended to health and eating. I guess it's kinda strange to carry the mantle of the protestants without being protestant one's self, yet it happens.
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249628161_The_moral...
Being fat is a moral failing though? It’s also not portrayed that way, see the entire body positivity/healthy at every size movement.
Kind of hard to feel sorry for the richest country in the world when they refuse to spend enough money to take care of their people enough to even meet basic national security standards.
Taking care of them was historically about calorie and nutrientmaxxing. Subsidized calories have worked too well, worldwide, and there's no response to it within the current Overton window.