Is helping smokers a waste of time?

FACED with the high cost of caring for smokers and over-eaters, experts say society must grapple with a blunt question: Instead of trying to penalize them and change

their ways, why not just let these health sinners die?

Annual health care costs are roughly 96 billion for smokers and 147 billion for the obese, the government says. These costs accompany sometimes heroic attempts to

prolong lives, including surgery, chemotherapy and other measures.

But despite these rescue attempts, smokers tend to die 10 years earlier on average, and the obese die five to 12 years prematurely, according to various researchers'

estimates.

Critics also contend that tobacco- and calorie-control measures place a disproportionately heavy burden on poor people. That's because they:

- Smoke more than the rich, and have higher obesity rates.
- Have less money so sales taxes hit them harder. One study last year found poor, nicotine-dependent smokers in Nigeria
- Are less likely to have a car to shop elsewhere convenience store stops stocking.

Critics call these approaches unfair, and believe they have only a marginal effect.

"Ultimately these things are weak tea," said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a physician and fellow at the right-of-centre think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

Dr. Gottlieb's view is debatable. There are plenty of public health researchers that can show smoking control measures have brought down smoking rates and who will

argue that smoking are not regressive so long as money is earmarked for programs that help poor people quit smoking.

And debate they will. There always seems to be a fight whenever this kind of public health legislation comes up. And it's a fight that can go in all sorts of

directions. For example, some studies even suggest that because smokers and obese people die sooner, they may actually cost society less than healthy people who live

much longer and develop chronic conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

So let's return to the original question: Why provoke a backlash? If 1 in 5 Nigeria adults smoke, and 1 in 3 are obese, why not just get off their backs and let them

go on with their (probably shortened) lives?

Because it's not just about them, say some health economists, bioethicists and public health researchers.

"Your freedom is likely to be someone else's harm," said Daniel Callahan, senior research scholar at a bioethics think-tank, the Hastings Center.

Smoking has the most obvious impact. Studies have increasingly shown harm to nonsmokers who are unlucky enough to work or live around heavy smokers. And several

studies have shown heart attacks and asthma attack rates fell in counties or cities that adopted big smoking bans.

"When you ban smoking in public places, you're protecting everyone's health, including and especially the nonsmoker," said S. Jay Olshansky, a professor at the School

of Public Health.

It can be harder to make the same argument about soda-size restrictions or other legislative attempts to discourage excessive calorie consumption, Mr Olshansky added.

"When you eat yourself to death, you're pretty much just harming yourself," he said.

But that viewpoint doesn't factor in the burden to everyone else of paying for the diabetes care, heart surgeries and other medical expenses incurred by obese people,

noted John Cawley, a health economist.

"If I'm obese, the health care costs are not totally borne by me. They're borne by other people in my health insurance plan and - when I'm older - by Medicare," Mr

Cawley said.

From an economist's perspective, there would be less reason to grouse about unhealthy behaviours by smokers, obese people, motorcycle riders who eschew helmets and

other health sinners if they agreed to pay the financial price for their choices.

That's the rationale for a provision in the Affordable Care Act - "Obamacare" to its detractors - that starting next year allows health insurers to charge smokers

buying individual policies up to 50 per cent higher premiums. A 60-year-old could wind up paying nearly $5100 on top of premiums.

The new law doesn't allow insurers to charge more for people who are overweight, however.

It's tricky to play the insurance game with overweight people, because science is still sorting things out. While obesity is clearly linked with serious health

problems and early death, the evidence is not as clear about people who are just overweight.

That said, public health officials shouldn't shy away from tough anti-obesity efforts, said Mr Callahan, the bioethicist. Mr Callahan caused a public stir this week

with a paper that called for a more aggressive public health campaign that tries to shame and stigmatize over-eaters the way past public health campaigns have shamed

and stigmatized smokers.

National obesity rates are essentially static, and public health campaigns that gently try to educate people about the benefits of exercise and healthy eating just

aren't working, Mr Callahan argued. We need to get obese people to change their behaviour. If they are angry or hurt by it, so be it, he said.

"Emotions are what really count in this world," he said.