>>>>>>but why socialize the cost of medicine of those unwilling to loose weight and unwilling to control their diet ? For my taste personal choice of living/behaviour should express itself in medical cost as well at least partially.
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>>>>I agree in principle but how can you legislate such a thing? What about the obese diabetic mother of 5, including a piano prodigy? To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: it's better to shell out for 99 undeserving than to abandon one deserving.
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>>>As someone who will be dealing with this for the rest of my life, I have mixed feelings.
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>>>My diet and lifestyle went out of control. I dropped 52 lbs and am in much better condition. But Type 2 runs in my family and I'll likely be taking metformin for the rest of my life. Even back in the spring when I dropped 20 lbs and had cut out some carbs and most sugar, my glucose was still dangerously high.
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>>Trying to legislate it would be problematic - better thing is to increase preemptive health checkups for everyone ....while it would not solve the problem,it would reduce it and solve some other issues as well.
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>There's 2 ways to look at that. You might have a point - but then again, if more people got preemptive checkups, there would probably be many more people diagnosed with diseases like diabetes, high cholesterol, etc.

Statistics on this are very clear though - if one has good preemptive care, in the long run they're going to spend a whole lot less money on healthcare all together. For example, a person who finds out they have high cholesterol then they can change their diet and/or get medication vs they don't know about it and they end up in the E.R. for having a heart attack and require open heart surgery...not to mention they will live a much more healthy and productive life in general - which is of course good for everyone ... the person themselves, their employer , their family, society as a whole, etc.
One of the deep data analysis I've done at work is exactly on this topic - the numbers astounding.