Chronic Disease Prevention Policies Need Better Costing Estimates

What a concept! Even if it is misapplied.

In order to capture the potential economic value to prevent obesity related diseases like diabetes and heart disease, policymakers have to increase the length of time when establishing cost estimates for legislative proposals for chronic health conditions. Investigators from the Campaign to End Obesity have established that policy makers are limited in their ability to consider effective policies to address these costly conditions based on their findings.

The study, "Assessing the Economics of Obesity and Obesity Interventions," which was led by Michael O'Grady and James Capretta, explains the method in which the Congressional Budget office measures the benefits of policies to address chronic diseases. Their cost estimates usually cover a 10-year period,. However, this period is not long enough to capture the costly complications of chronic diseases, like those linked to obesity, given that many complications take over 10 years to manifest.

When it comes to fat people, longer will surely demonstrate more failure since they cannot keep the weight off even in the short-term.

A big reason is the bad weight loss advice that is doomed to fail.

Doomed to fail advice does not improve over time.