Well, yeah, they die sooner...
- Thread starter Big Don
- Start date
Hmmm.... sounds to me as if someone's leaving out one of the major arguments: yes, healthy people live longer and cost more to treat, but what about their lifetime productivity compared with that of people who are chronically ill as a result of the damage that smoking and obesity cause? In terms of missed days of work, if it has to be quantified out in some way. How much does that add up to, over the collective lifetimes of the two populations being contrasted in the study? Seems to me that you would need to factor that in, before you came up with any final assessment of costs to the system.
My mother was a professor of English at a college in Nassau County and retired in her early 80s. She paid working-person's taxes for nearly half a century. Anyone with a similar story can say the same thing, and can point to much higher productivity numbers, from what I've read, than people who have to miss work on a regular basis. The Dutch study, so far as I can see, does not address that factor at all, but only looks at the up-front medical costs. Nor does it seem to take into account the social-services and assistance costs to the dependents of people who die too young because of obesity/smoking-related illness. I think a true picture of the social costs of these factors needs to look at a much broader set of connections between health on the one hand and economics on the other....
My mother was a professor of English at a college in Nassau County and retired in her early 80s. She paid working-person's taxes for nearly half a century. Anyone with a similar story can say the same thing, and can point to much higher productivity numbers, from what I've read, than people who have to miss work on a regular basis. The Dutch study, so far as I can see, does not address that factor at all, but only looks at the up-front medical costs. Nor does it seem to take into account the social-services and assistance costs to the dependents of people who die too young because of obesity/smoking-related illness. I think a true picture of the social costs of these factors needs to look at a much broader set of connections between health on the one hand and economics on the other....
