What are they smoking at Franklin Pierce Law Center?

[Braddogg]

Have you ever stopped to examine the question of why, in this wonderful "enlightened" age of modern medicine, are Americans so fat and so sick? And the related question: Why does the expense of "health care" now account for upwards of 20% of GNP?

There are biological, evolutionary, and technological reasons for the first question, and government for the second.  People are fat and sick because we evolved to enjoy the taste of foods that aren't healthy in large quantities, like sugars.  This was to give us incentive to go and get those things when they were in short supply, and it was virtually impossible to overindulge.  Humans also lived very physically demanding lives, and it is only relatively recently that sedentary careers became popular.  Combine that -- sedentary lifestyle -- with advances in agriculture -- fatty foods are commonplace and affordable -- and I think that explains fatness pretty well.

Health care is expensive, it seems, because of government regulation and because there is not truly a free market in health care.  For example, Massachusetts' new law mandating health insurance will -- I have no doubt -- lead to increases in insurance rates (I look forward to having evidence to test that hypothesis).  Add that to increased lifespans and a trigger-happy tort system, and that seems like a solid way to understand the increase in health care costs.

What are your theories?