Phoning It In

Posted By elissa on Aug 20, 2009 | 3 comments

I’ve read this article on obesity by NYT columnist David Leonhardt so you don’t have to.  Here’s the short version:

“There’s an obesity crisis and the government needs to do something about it.”

No, really.  That’s what it all boils down to. It’s one of the most vacuous analyses I’ve ever seen on the subject.

First, he considers punitive measures against obese people for raising health care costs…

A natural response to this cost would be to say that the people imposing it on society should be required to pay it. Cosgrove mentioned to me an idea that some economists favor: charging higher health-insurance premiums to anyone with a certain body-mass index. Harsh? Yes. Fair? You can see the argument.

But then dismisses the idea…

And yet it turns out that the obese already do pay something resembling their fair share of medical costs, albeit in an indirect way. Overweight workers are paid less than similarly qualified, thinner colleagues, according to research by Jay Bhattacharya and M. Kate Bundorf of Stanford. The cause isn’t entirely clear. But the size of the wage difference is roughly similar to the size of the difference in their medical costs.

Because the problem is complicated!

The question of personal responsibility, then, ends up being more complicated than it may seem. It’s hard to argue that Americans have collectively become more irresponsible over the last 30 years; the murder rate has plummeted, and divorce and abortion rates have fallen. And our genes certainly haven’t changed in 30 years.

Nonetheless, he knows what the true cause of obesity is…

What has changed is our environment. Parents are working longer, and takeout meals have become a default dinner. Gym classes have been cut. The real price of soda has fallen 33 percent over the last three decades. The real price of fruit and vegetables has risen more than 40 percent.

Ta-da!  People are obese because they live in an obesegenic environment.  Who knew?

And the solution is…???

…any effort to attack obesity will inevitably involve making value judgments and even limiting people’s choices. Most of the time, the government has no business doing such things. But there is really no other way to cure an epidemic.

Voila! Problem solved.  Except that it isn’t… it would help to know, for example, exactly what he thinks the government should do, and how it should go about doing it.  That, however, would take considerably more research – not to mention a lot of hard work.  Better to phone it in…after all, the paycheck’s the same either way.