[mschwaig]

A consequence of universal healthcare that people don't talk about much is that it turns unhealthy citizens from an individual cost into more of a collective one. So it makes sense that countries with universal healthcare regulate in favor of their citizens as opposed to their food industry, because they're paying for the consequences more directly.

[cthor]

Not that this affects the political calculus (where perception may as well be reality), but the cost burden specific to universal healthcare is actually opposite this intuition.

Things like obesity, smoking, and alcoholism all kill you before you can get too old. Healthy citizens end up using far more of the far more expensive end-of-life care, to the point where it outweighs the extra healthcare the unhealthy citizens use in their youth.

[samzub]

This (French) study [0] published in 2023 on data from 2019 calculates that the costs from legal drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, including higher helthcare spend during the life of smokers/drinkers, are still higher than revenue from unspent money on pensions and taxes, and cost of healthy person living years.

[0] https://www.ofdt.fr/sites/ofdt/files/2023-08/field_media_doc...

[s1mplicissimus]

This sounds like an interesting proposition, do you happen to have the numbers to back it up?

[u_sama]

This is both an argument in favor of universal healthcare, and my favorite argument for why the US should not implement it without first changing a whole array of perverse incentives.

[tonyedgecombe]

That doesn’t seem to be working in the UK. We are nearly as bad as the US for obesity.

[rootusrootus]

Indeed, I would caution pretty much everyone else in the world (except maybe Asians, but even then) to be circumspect when taunting Americans for their obesity rates. Germany, to use an example from this discussion, has been going up steadily for decades. Doesn't seem like this is a US-specfic problem or something that Europe has a good answer for.

[s1artibartfast]

Nonsense. This is essentially a bottom-up process, not the result of government regulation.

It has to do with culture and wealth. Europe is getting fatter and richer.

This is like thinking medieval peasants or sub-saharan Africa are skinnier because of their robust paternalistic governments