First we deal with over-charging, then we can deal with over spending. Right now, the obese and smokers are propping up the Social Security and Medicare systems by dying off before they use what they put in, so lets not get hasty.

Florida just kicked up the tobacco tax and revenues have plummeted, They found the magic “Laffer” point at a dollar a pack, added to the Fed increase. People will quit or buy on the black market that has already started.

The problem with high-supply areas is that with fewer customers per provider, each provider must charge more to get the amount of profit that he desires. Because all of the providers in the area are operating under the same Dillinger Rules, they all do this, meaning that normal competition can’t drive down prices. Instead, the bigger supply simply drives *up* prices, since each robber err doctor or hospital simply hikes its prices more to obtain its desired amount of heist money err profit.

So anyhow, that’s yet another reason why the entire notion of competition being the solution to health care costs is a sham. When the whole industry operates under Dillinger Rules — “your money, or your life” — there’s no real need for any entity in the industry to compete. You don’t see muggers competing to see who can mug less money from each victim, do you? Same deal — an increase in the number of muggers in an area does *not* decrease how much money they obtain from each victim!

– Badtux the (Healthcare) Mugging Penguin

Same deal with cigarette smoking. Again we have studies on this. A smoker in a given year uses more health care than a non-smoker, but over the course of a lifetime, smokers use less health care than non-smokers because they die earlier. Sorry, you can’t explain America’s health care costs based on unhealthy eating habits or smoking, because over 1/4th of healthcare costs go to the oldest Americans, who are NOT, in general, fat or unhealthy (since the fat/unhealthy ones stroked out or died of a heart attack years earlier).
.-= last blog ..Box or birdie? =-.

Big Food vs. Big Insurance
No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s the elephant in the room. Cheap, convenient food is generally bad food. It takes a conscious effort to avoid it. And good reading glasses to see the tiny print on the packaging that tells you what’s in there.

One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

.-= last blog ..Curious Chipmunk =-.