we run into trouble because there really ISN’T enough money for parity of top care across the board regardless of illness, treatment, etc.

I like where you’re coming from with this, but lots of people don’t get top care now. Lots of people don’t get any care now. And as far as I can tell, the advantages of universal health care aren’t that everyone can go to the best oncologist in America, it’s that *everyone* can get a mammogram (men get breast cancer, too!). And when you can catch your more serious diseases at an early stage, not only is there a lower mortality rate, it costs a lot less. When we’re talking about preventative care, we’re saving even *more* money, even if we don’t care about preventing unnecessary deaths. Publically fund the flu vaccine, save 40,000 people a year. If we assume people are inherently worth millions of dollars, then we’ve just saved a hell of a lot of money. Give people a cervical cancer vaccine, stop having to treat a lot of people for cervical cancer. So not only are we not paying for insurance company profits, we’re not paying for end-stage care for diseases we’ve caught early and we’re not paying to treat pretty much *any* diseases that have available and simple prophylaxis. If we’re talking about having limited funds, I literally cannot imagine an expansion of Medicaid (which is, actually, pretty well run) that wouldn’t *save* us money. Along with saving a hell of a lot of lives.

To pennylane, from yesterday — I’m sorry for stepping out.

I wasn’t monetizing, really, when I said there is a difference in value added between what doctors provide and what professors of English provide. It’d be nonsensical to monetize that as such. They’re too different. It’s a category error.

But when you’re talking health care policy you do have to monetize. I’m saying that if Jane Random Person has just been diagnosed with colon cancer metastasized to the liver and can expect a 2-year median survival with treatment or a few months tops without, UNLESS she can get a top liver surgeon to operate and give her a fighting chance of living a long and full life? She would “need” that surgery in a different sense than the sense in which Helen Vendler’s graduate seminar on Keats, which comes to mind because it was one of the most astounding and impressive and fulfilling classes I’ve ever sat in on and gave me an abiding faith in and sense of humanity’s intellectual potential, “needs” to be given. Now, does that seminar need to be given? Hell to the fuck to the yes. But we “need” top docs in a different way than we “need” top profs. It’s OK to me that Jane Random Person might have to pay (raise, borrow, obtain funding for) $50K out of pocket her own self for the tuition to take that poetry class, in a way that it isn’t OK to me for her to have to pay (raise, borrow, etc) $50 out of pocket for that lifesaving medical treatment.

Again, if it’s an entitlement, and if everybody deserves to have every lifesaving treatment funded, we run into trouble because there really ISN’T enough money for parity of top care across the board regardless of illness, treatment, etc. We’re talking diseases that can max your million-dollar ceiling out in eight months. Do we add the $100,000-a-year biologic agent to the 87-year-old metastatic cancer patient’s treatment? I don’t know. I think it depends on the particular 87-year-old and the particular cancer. In some cases, yes. But who’s going to be in charge of making that call? And what kind of laws and pressures will be brought to bear on them? And that’s where you come back around to how fat people are going to make out in a universal system with all the attending algorithms and criteria and metrics and pay-for performance mechanisms.

But the issue of healthcare provider compensation as such is probably a red herring since, as spacedcowgirl said, “Medicine is a challenging field that requires a special type of person to be successful at it, and I think that generally recognized fact would continue to be rewarded with prestige and decent pay.” Though, Kaethe, I am also concerned about the quality and quantity of nursing and support staffing that will be paid for.

“So we also have universal mansions, gold bathroom fixtures, and trips to Aruba” cracked my shit up really hard, in a dark way.

I’m not a Libertarian, btw, and I don’t have a final yes or no opinion on universal healthcare. A lot of me thinks it can’t be worse and may be better than the status quo. (For capitalist as well as humanitarian reasons — I’d be out there doing a start-up myself if insurance weren’t tied to my current on-staff corporate job.) I just have a fair amount of knowledge of the industry that feeds into a really, really strong sense of caution about, um, well, every proposal I see, really.

Of course, in keeping with what we write about all the time here, I am awfully curious about how the researchers defined “obese.”

Sorry if this has already been answered — I didn’t read the entire thread. But in case no one has answered this yet, their “obese” sample consisted of nonsmokers with BMIs of 30 or higher.