Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Pierre Dubois of VoxEU has a suggestion to reduce obesity rates: a junk food tax. Dubois claims that a junk food tax of 5% would reduce junk food consumption by 15% and thus reduce obesity. While junk food is not healthy, it offers the most calories per dollar. Thus, a junk food tax would fall…
There is much evidence that has shown that over time for most developed countries, people have been getting fatter. Obesity rates are especially high in the U.S., but a trend towards increased obesity is similar in most developed countries. Are obesity rates “too high?” In a recent NBER working paper, Philipson and Posner argue that…
Living in an urban, pedestrian friendly area may compel individuals to walk more, and thus reduce the likelihood one is obese. Living in a suburban, car-dependent area makes walking less attractive and thus could increase obesity. Some studies have shown that individuals who live in the suburbs weigh more than individuals living in urban areas.…
Increasing obesity rates have significant costs to society. An article in MSN Money (“What if no one were fat?“) claims that if, on average, each American was to lose 20 pounds, we would save $487 billion. Where is this number coming from? Savings on fuel for cars and airlines due to their lighter loads would…
Gruber (1994) shows that the costs of employer-provided health insurance benefits are passed on to employees through lower wages. But do employees with higher expected medical expenses have their wages reduced by a higher amount to reflect the additional medical costs to employers? This may not be the case if employers can not observe the…
Are you friends members of the Marathon Runner’s of America club or the Bratwurst and Philly Cheesesteak club? If the answer is the later, you are much more likely to be obese than the former. This is the finding of a 2007 NEJM paper by Christakis and Fowler. Obese individuals are more likely to be…
Why do people want to lose weight? While this seems like an obvious question, it does merit answering. There are two major reasons: health concerns and appearance. Being obese increases the risk of suffering from many diseases (e.g.: diabetes). On the appearance side, individuals may experience social pressure to lose (or possibly gain) weight. Further,…
How do we measure the financial burden of elderly obesity? At first this seems like an easy question to answer. Find the average medical spending of the obese elderly and compare that to the spending of an elderly individual of healthy weight. Yet causation is difficult to show. True, it is possible that the obese…
Do state physical education (PE) requirement help to decrease the percentage of children and teens who are overweight? This is the question Cawley, Meyerhoefer and Newhouse investigate in their 2007 Health Economics paper. One would certainly not be surprised if PE requirements decrease the prevalence of obesity, but this may not be correct. PE requirements…
A general result in the obesity literature, is that higher female labor participation rates lead to higher obesity rates in children. For instance, the 1996 Welfare Reform act (PRWORA) increased work requirements for low-income mothers and thus increased labor participation and likely childhood obesity. One question which has not been resolved yet thorough which mechanisms…