Cost of health care

[Guest guest]

In our daily newspaper there was an article about the cost ofhealth care to

society, comparing healthy, obese, and diabetic people. The premise of

governments has been that improving care for obesity and diabetes will save the

government money.

Nay, not so. Healthy people are more expensive to care for as they live longer

and then are more likely to get Alzheimer's and pine away in long term care.

Unhealthy people died sooner and thus ultimately saved society money in the cost

of future health expenditure's and social security as well, I suppose. They

also noted that lung cancer is a fairly cheap disease to treat as people don't

live very long when they get it.

I couldn't tell if the authors were just being very concrete in the

interpretation or tongue in cheek. I haven't read the article myself, just the

paper's interpretation of it.

Kathy Broman

Mason City, IA