Delos M. Cosgrove, a heart surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic -- which recently stopped hiring smokers -- says that if it were up to him, he would also stop hiring obese people. When told that many people might consider it unfair, he was unapologetic.
"Why is it unfair?” he asked. “Has anyone ever shown the law of conservation of matter doesn’t apply?” People’s weight is a reflection of how much they eat and how active they are. The country has grown fat because it’s consuming more calories and burning fewer. Our national weight problem brings huge costs, both medical and economic. Yet our anti-obesity efforts have none of the urgency of our anti-smoking efforts. “We should declare obesity a disease and say we’re going to help you get over it,” Cosgrove said. (Full story HERE.)
Monday, August 17, 2009
Heavy Topic
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
When the government starts dipping even deeper into my wallet to pay for other people's healthcare (even after I pay $13,000 per year of my own money to pay for my family's health insurance) I'm going to get ALL KINDS of opinionated about strangers' health habits. I'm rapidly warming up to Cosgrove's point of view.
To say that obesity is a disease, and in the same breath, say that those disease sufferers should be denied work makes Dr. Cosgrove a very bad man. All human beings get sick and die of something.
We live longer than ever before. One of the consequences of extended life spans is the degenerative diseases associated with old age. Are those diseases somehow less expensive to treat than some obese person's diabetes or bad heart? Which person actually ends up costing more in the long run?
Post a Comment