West Virginia taxpayers may soon be paying for portly citizens to attend Weight Watchers meetings. The state claims it’s spending $100 million a year on obesity-related health care. Now, in an effort to reduce those costs, the state’s largest Medicaid provider—UniCare, a subsidiary of Wellpoint—will pony up for 16 weeks of subsidized Weight Watchers services. Wellpoint intends to establish similar payouts in 14 other states.
Unfortunately, the change in unlikely to help the bottom line. Tennessee tried a similar plan last year and boasted that the 1,400 subsidized participants lost 8000 pounds collectively. That may sound good, but it averages out to a little less than six pounds per person—not enough to make a difference in health care costs or the lives of the obese people the plan is supposed to help.
This isn’t the first time West Virginia has dipped into the state coffers to encourage dieting. In 2003 it erected billboards proclaiming “Biggie Fries = Biggie Thighs.†No statewide reductions in thigh circumference have been reported.
And Radley Balko quite correctly says:
Where, exactly, is the problem, here? Seems to me that people are making their own decisions about diet and health, and paying for the consequences of those decisions.
He doesn’t get it. Obesity is a PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS! (at least on the days when the health-related Chicken Littlism isn’t POOR PEOPLE STARVING AND EATING OUT OF GARBAGE CANS! It’s liberalism. It’s all about having an elite tell us what we may and may not do. That’s all liberalism is about, and all it has ever been about. Not civil rights. Not freedom. Just control.
But the point, of course, is that again, we have millions and millions of dollars pumped into a government program that produces no results–and as Jeffrey Quick points out, we have another here:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The early onset of Daylight Savings Time in the United States this year may have been for naught.
The move to turn the clocks forward by an hour on March 11 rather than the usual early April date was mandated by the U.S. government as an energy-saving effort.
But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage.
“We haven’t seen any measurable impact,” said Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co., one of the nation’s largest power companies, echoing comments from several large utilities.
You don’t say. But no doubt it made the legislators and bureaucrats who supported the DST pushback feel good about themselves.
Idiots.
