Americans keep getting fatter, and so do their health-care bills.
Consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers, after surveying the nation’s health care insurers, predicts health care costs may spike by more than 10 percent next year.
Blame it on an aging population and increasingly expensive medical technology. Blame profiteers and bureaucrats in both the insurance and medical sectors. One reason medical costs keep rising is girth.
“Obesity-related expenditures … accounted for one-fourth of the increase in health spending between 1987 and 2001,” the PricewaterhouseCoopers report said. “The costs associated with this condition are staggering. … Obese Americans are twice as likely to have heart disease. That translates into rising demand for more expensive procedures, drugs and medical services.”
About 71 million American adults now suffer from some form of cardiovascular disease, according to the American Heart Association. The resulting deaths are projected to increase by 130 percent by 2050.
Somebody has to pay for all these Big Mac attacks. It won’t be just the people who eat themselves to death like goldfish. Insurance companies do not charge by the pound, so there is no discount for being thin or penalty for being fat. Insurance, after all, means sharing the risks.
I bring this up because we’re well into the obesity season. This is traditional grazing period that begins with bags of Halloween candy and climaxes with Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts, with fast-food binges during the many shopping sprees in between. It ends with a New Year’s Day hangover and halfhearted plans to finally diet or exercise.
It seems like every year now, somebody lights their home on fire while trying to drop a turkey into a super-sized, deep-fat fryer. It already happened last week in upstate New York. A man knocked over a propane-heated fryer, incinerating his single-wide mobile home.
Mark my words, this scene will repeat itself before Thanksgiving Day is over because Americans love to fry everything.
We are now the fattest generation that ever stomped the face of this planet. And please don’t all stomp at once because all 300 million of us weigh about 50 billion pounds. The average weight of American men increased from 168 to 180 pounds over the past 20 years, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which also tracks the weights of pigs, cattle, sheep and other livestock. The average weight of American women grew from 142 to 152 pounds.
Two-thirds of us are overweight. Nearly one-third of us are obese. And there is a lot of money to be made selling both the disease and the purported cures.
Earlier this year, food-manufacturing giant Nestlé SA – which gave us the delicious Nestlé Crunch bar in 1938 – announced plans to acquire Jenny Craig for $600 million. This is not so much a contradiction but a response to consumers who demand fattening foods and immediate weight loss at the same time.
Most consumers are apparently aware that their collective demands are paradoxical. In a recent survey by Allrecipes.com and USA Weekend magazine of 1,600 respondents, 77 percent said they believe parents are to blame for childhood obesity and 85 percent said they believe individuals are responsible for their weight – not McDonald’s.
Self-awareness is a good start.
It’s getting expensive treating those who are so fat they can’t fit on a gurney.
Medical centers are now buying bigger, sturdier equipment to handle the loads. By 2010, hospitals will spend more than $1 billion a year on equipment and surgical devices for the obese, up from $500 million this year, according to a recent analysis by Waltham, Mass.-based Millennium Research Group.
“Wheelchairs, beds, scales, and longer-length devices are often required when … procedures are performed on very obese individuals,” said Millennium analyst Lexie Code. “When laparoscopic surgery is performed on morbidly obese patients, the distance between skin-level incisions … and the internal organs is much longer. Hospitals must … purchase more expensive, longer- length devices to accommodate such procedures.”
Kind of like those big straws you get with a 44-ounce serving of Coke or Pepsi.
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Respond to Lewis at denverpostbloghouse.com/lewis, 303-954-1967 or alewis@denverpost.com.
