Public Costs of Obesity: Myth or Fact?

There's an unhealthy obsession with the fact that a proportion of citizens of many countries are classified as obese. While I am reluctant to accept the claims of impending doom from the Obesity Epidemic, I am not opposed to benign public education and tax measures on the high calorie foods that lead to weight gain and subsequent health problems for individuals. What I have been opposed to in earlier posts such as this, is the imposition of any diet plans on students or adults under the guise of reducing future expenses to the state from morbidity that is driven by obesity.

I was therefore surprised by this piece by Daniel Engber in the Slate Magazine which summarizes a paper by Dutch researchers challenging the conventional view that providing medical care for fat people is inherently more expensive. Starting with the received wisdom that morbidly obese people have shorter lifespans, the consequence of this is lower medical costs on the whole. Essentially therefore, the cost savings argument that is used to justify interference with individual choices is not well-considered. There may remain a legitimate reason to make obesity a public health issue but cost savings on health expenditure is not one of them.

All that's left than are the secondary arguments of productivity losses and improvements on quality of life. As I may add, all these are important but rest entirely within the domain of personal choice. Or don't they?