Get-off-your-butt money!

While unhealthy lifestyle is recognised as the major cause of chronic illness, what is not acknowledged is that Medicare encourages, subsidises, and rewards this behaviour by allowing the unhealthy to consume the bulk of the community’s health resources.

The AGPN’s solution to the obesity crisis is to continue down this path, and increase the reward for being unhealthy by creating yet another subsidy. And to what end? To “educate” people about what they surely must already know: that a poor diet and no exercise makes you obese.

But the incentives in the health system are set to change. As the population ages in coming decades, increasing numbers of elderly people in particular are going to suffer chronic illnesses. In some parts of Britain, health authorities have already moved to cut costs by denying expensive hip replacement surgery to obese people.

As the rising cost of treating “lifestyle” disease places an unsustainable strain on Medicare, similar bans are inevitable in Australia. Medicare simply will not be able to provide all possible therapies and procedures to all patients on demand. Lifestyle is set to become the key criteria used to refuse certain treatment to certain patients.

Rather than sit-up money, increasing the public’s awareness of the realities of healthcare in the 21st century, and what the consequences of a poor lifestyle will be, is a more effective way of tackling the obesity crisis. This should give people a real incentive to lose weight.