Blonde hair is a recessive gene. I don't believe they've isolated an "obesity gene" yet though, so I don't know if it's dominant or recessive.

I have no doubt that obesity can be genetic, of course, as some of the many causes of obesity are genetic. However, we were talking about people who might be responsible for their obesity. I'm not sure I would hold a five year old responsible for his unhealthy lifestyle, even when it's the lifestyle that's the cause of obesity, rather than a genetic problem.

Should we subsidize health care for poor people at all? I say yes, and you may disagree. However, if you agree with subsidizing life-saving health care (diabetes treatment, heart disease treatment, etc.), then it makes sense (and saves money) to treat those conditions through preventative care.

Are you opposed any subsidized health care at all? The guy in West Virginia with black lung, from working in the coal mines-- should he be treated, even though he has no insurance and can't afford to pay? After all, he CHOSE to work in the mines, why should we be forced to pay for it?

This isn't about the government stepping in and teling people to lose weight. It's about providing medical treatment to those who seek it but can't afford it.

By the way, does anyone know if Medicare provides health care for people trying to quit smoking?

I had to stop and reply to some of these comments. I agree mostly with what the orginal post stated. I have always been overweight my life and I know why. I don't exercise and I eat too much. Yes, being bigger does run in my family, but it is up to me to do something about it. I do NOT think that it is the responsiblity of the government to take the hamburger from my mouth. That goes the same to the AIDS comment. In this day and age we know the major ways that AIDS is recieved. Why should I pay for someone else being an idiot? Now I have to pay out of my pocket because Johnny next door can't stop eating?
I have compassion. If these people need help, that is what the local communities and churches need to get involved.

It's not hard to do at all. You raise the taxes on that stuff the same way they get most taxes past most people - by not letting the effect of the tax be obvious.

Say Sheila, who's single without kids, makes $9/hr. If she got the entire thing every week she would get a check for a whopping total of $360 a week on which she would have to cover all of her expenses including her rent, food, car insurance, you name it.

What if, in addition to all of that, she had to write a check to the Federal Government for $100. How long do you think people would tolerate that?

So instead, the Federal Government takes out something like $240 a month before she ever sees it and Sheila gets a check instead for about $305 instead. As a result, she doesn't realize the impact or what that extra $240 a month, which is very possibly more than she is paying for her share of the rent where she is living, would mean for her standard of living. If she were overweight it is almost certainly enough to pay for the cost of almost any plan she chose to follow, even if it involved a gym membership.

The loss of that much of her income is so unseen that, if her check was for $300 each week should would feel like the government was being so nice to give her a check for $260 every year.

And if she works hard and over time gets to a point that she is making three times as much money her taxes don't go up by a factor of three - that wouldn't be fair. So they go up by about a factor of six.

And none of this includes state or local income tax.

It's the same with gasoline, cigarettes, and alchohol - the price you see on the sign already includes the taxes because, if it didn't, people would be outraged. Everyone is so quick to dump on the oil companies if the price of gasoline goes up a dime but few even realize that it would come out to about forty cents a gallon lower if they only had to pay normal sales tax on it. But if the sign said $1.49 a gallon and people who bought $15 worth had another $5 tacked on they would scream.

I remember when I was a kid I noticed that we never had to pay sales tax on gasoline and asked my dad why it wasn't taxed just like everything else - at which point he told how much tax was already included in the price. Because I didn't see the tax being added at the time it was purchased, I assumed that it wasn't taxed at all.

You can easily have the same thing happen - in fact it has been proposed already - that the manufacturers of the incredients be taxed so that the higher cost would flow down to all of the foods that used that ingredient. What people would see would be a gradual rise in the shelf price of lots of products that was outpacing the rise in other products, but there would be no drive to throw the rascals out.

I kind of resent the implication that I'm insensitive and not showing compassion simply because I feel obesity IS the result of poor choices. And, yes, I've been without health insurance and have also lived on public assistance a couple of times when I was a young single mother who had lost my job. I was given about $300 a month in food stamps to spend how I pleased. Whether I bought crap or nutrition was up to me.

I think it's possible to show compassion and understand that lower-income people are in a tough spot, but I don't think it's really compassion to absolve them of personal responsibility because of it.

Obesity is not as simple problem as he thinks. If the skinny person eats all the Big Macs the other guy eats, he may never gain weight.

Our body weights are regulated. We are not made to be in need of suppressing our hunger in order to stay fit. We are made to eat whenever our bodies tell us to. In fact the reason we gain weight could very well be our repeated attempts to suppress hunger.

Nobody yet knows for sure what causes obesity. Is it the enlargement of the stomach caused by eating plenty of carbohydrate rich food? Is it the repeated attempts to lose weight by reducing calories? or is it some other mysterious reason?

Should the lucky skinny man pay for his neighbor's misery? This is nothing that I can decide upon!

And what kind of "help" is the person likely to receive? My sister is on SSI because she is disabled. What is her disability that prevents her from working? She is morbidly obese! Of course, the fact that she's only had three or four jobs in her entire life and never held any of them more than a couple of months before dipping in to the till and getting fired has nothing to do with her not being able to find work.

The kicker is that when she got on SSI she was told that she would lose her eligibility if her weight dropped below some level (I think it was in the 300 pound range) and for a while she was all upset because she had dropped below below that limit and had to get back above it before she went in for some eligibility review the following week.

A prime example of our good ole compassionate government at work!

I suppose if there was an incentive instead of a penalty for her to get better, it would help. Still, not to sound mean, but anyone who will deliberately stuff themselves in order to get benefits and avoid work is clearly abusing the system. That says more about the person's character than the system, really.

Oh, it says a lot about her character, but it also says something about the system.

There is no shortage of people willing and eager to abuse the system - just as there are lots of people that only want to use it for what was intended. But the system itself, by and large, doesn't care which category you fall in to.

The system itself has incentives to let people abuse the system. As in most large organizations the prestige that a manager has is strongly related to how many people they supervise. The more people you have on the rolls, the more people you need to process their paperwork - especially if you inflate the amount of paperwork that has to be generated. As long as they can get more money from Congress each year it is in their interests to not be too picky.

Local charities, on the other hand, have lots of incentive to weed out the abusers and do a much better, though it can never be perfect, job of it. They have limited funds and usually have to work hard to obtain those funds. Also, they generally have a lot lower fraction of people working for them that only see it as a job with a paycheck and so more people take more initiative to prevent abuse.

There are lots of charities that are able to deliver around 90% of all revenues to the aid of the intended purpose (and there are "charities" that don't come anywhere near this - even being the exact opposite - which is why you have to be real careful who you donate to). As near as I have ever been able to determine, appropriated funds for Federal aid programs get something like 30% to the recipients with the rest getting absorbed by the buracracy.

Doesn't it seem odd that a charity is required to track that percentage and tell it to anyone that they solicit donations from while the federal government has no such obligation? Just one more example of how government has no qualms imposing rules on everyone else that they themselves don't see any need to live by.

And say you did choose to buy healthy food at the time, what would you have purchased? Fat free cereal, skim milk, pasta, bagels, low fat muffins, margarine, fat free popcorn and pretzels as snacks?

When I was a baby the doctor told my mother to feed me skim milk because fat is bad for you.

For the longest time I assumed that those foods listed above were healthy and the main part of a good healthy diet. Many people still think that way.

How many times do you go to the supermarket and see some very overweight lady with tons of fat free stuff in her cart thinking that she is trying to be as healthy as she can and take care of herself?

I agree, poor choices are part of it, but nutritional misinformation about what choices are actually healthy for you is another part.

How many people thought at one point that being a vegetarian or vegan was one of the healthiest things possible? I know I did, it didnt even click with me that I knew plenty of fat vegetarians and vegans, nor did I realize the type of nutritional deficiencies they might have in their diet until I began LCing and educating myself more.

There was also a time when people were smoking and didnt think it was harmful in the least, should those people be blamed for smoking in the first place even though they didnt think it was harmful? Should they be denied public assistance when they get cancer?

Consider yourself lucky As in the USA, the major cost of gaz, in Canada, is also taxes. However, despite this, we are not spared sales tax on this product. We still have to pay a 15% tax on what is basically tax. Since you consider that we have to hand over about 33% of our salary to the governement to begin with, I don't even want to think about how much the governement is really making on that one purchase of gaz.

Oh, and the same thing applies to beer, wine and spirits.

Someone gotta to pay for all that free healthcare ...

MyJourney-- I can't deny the misinformation that's out there. Todays given fact is tomorrow's "remember when we thought ___ was good for you?" There are too many people for whom the fat-free and foods you described would be a huge nutritional step UP, though, out of apathy more than simple ignorance.

wbahn-- you bet the system is full of holes. My own personal example is the offer of assistance with the mountain of hospital bills left for me after my insurance paid what they would for my son's back-to-back surgeries last winter. Out of the several thousands of dollars of non-covered charges, I found he could get coverage for about 70% of them. What a relief! The irony occurred a few months later, when the charges had still not all been sent in. Seems we weren't having enough billed to them, and they threatened to close his case. According to a durable medical equipment person we deal with regularly, people like us who only use it when we have NO other choice often get cut off since we aren't "needy" enough. I thought I was being self-sufficient and careful with resources that could go to someone who had no other means...

"By the way, does anyone know if Medicare provides health care for people trying to quit smoking?"

Last I heard the answer was no.

They wouldn't cover any inpatient program....no one does. If there are any outpatient programs, I've never heard of any, but if there are any they might be covered at 80% (If you have part B). As for Welbutrin and the patch, well meds aren't covered unless you have a supplemental policy (new drug coverage is unlikely to cover these, since there are many more meds not covered than there are covered.

Few insurance companies cover smoking cessation....and if they do, they cover a limited use of the patch or wellbutrin.

I always figure if I could afford the cost of cigarettes, I could afford the stop-smoking aids to quit. I used the Commit lozenges. They helped a lot, since working in a bar, it was a bit harder to give up. With cigarettes at nearly $3 a pack then, and Lord knows how much NOW, the $35 box of "help" was roughly equal to a carton of cigarettes.

My biggest stop-smoking aid was free. I looked my kids in the eye and PROMISED them I would never smoke again. In our house, if you say "I'll try" you can wiggle out of it...if you say "I promise." there are very few acceptable reasons to break it. Trust me, it was still hard, but when I was tempted to light up even WITH the aids, I had to spend some time conjuring up a picture of how disappointed they'd be and what lesson they'd learn if they saw me back out of my promise. It worked every time.

Actually, from the googling, I've found that there are programs in the works to figure out what smoking-cessation program is the most effective. You can read about it here and here.


I have got a few questions for those who don't think obesity treatment should be covered by Medicare/Medicaid:

Should the treatment be covered by private health insurance (which receives government money/tax breaks)? For the most part, it is, although the more invasive stomach surgery is becoming less likely to be covered than before.

Should Medicare/Medicaid be abolished completely, or should it's scope be much narrower than the scope of private health insurance? What should or shouldn't be covered?

What should be the key to determining if health care is covered by Medicare/Medicaid?
*Health care for everyone
*Public Health (communicable diseases)
*Able-bodied work force (only the young and able-bodied, what's needed for productivity)
*Health care for children (who can't help being poor)
*Health care for the old, as a benefit for previous years in service to the work force
*Etc.