Should Medicaid cover obesity surgery?

[Lyric]

Poll question: Should Medicaid cover obesity surgery?

Obesity is extremely common among impoverished citizens, for varying reasons including poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of support resources, and general ill health. Obesity can lead to or contribute to long-term health problems like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke. Those problems tend to be very, very expensive to treat. Eliminating or reducing obesity could increase length of life, quality of life, and vastly reduce obesity-associated health care expenses--expenses that, with Medicaid recipients, the public will have to bear.

With all of that in mind--should Medicaid cover bariatric surgery to combat obesity?

[Manifestor_of_Light]

1. Yes.

The morality police are slowly losing ground--not on DU much.

Being fat is not necessarily a moral issue, or an issue of discipline to not eat too much. Metabolism is not a simple in/out energy equation like you would have in thermodynamics. It is far more complex than that.

I think they should also cover liposuction. Many people have metabolic/glandular problems (I have a dead thyroid like 30 million other Americans) and cannot lose the fat merely by having a lapband procedure. My body is not using my food efficiently, so I would not necessarily lose weight by starving myself with a lapband procedure. In fact I have been on a restricted calorie diet and all it did was slow down my metabolism, making losing weight harder.

I do not eat unhealthy food nor do I eat excessive portions. Yes I know, some people here, wouldn't believe me. They think everybody who is fat is a glutton who stuffs junk food in constantly and never gets exercise. They all have fast metabolisms and no problem staying at a healthy weight, amazingly enough.

I believe that the only way I would be able to lose much weight would be liposuction.

[the redcoat]

2. Only if

a medical professional determines that the person is in immediate danger.

If this isn't the case, then I don't see the correlation between this and other operations, which are understood as being necessary for the patient to continue living.


And, to support obesity surgery as the answer to poor diet and poor exercise is just about as ignorant and stubborn as you can get. We Americans are infamous for ignoring the cause when looking for the answer, because we don't want to change what we've gotten used to.


Edit: Sorry, this was meant to be a response to the OP

[Manifestor_of_Light]

3. Read up on "metabolic syndrome".

There is a correlation between obesity and diabetes and heart disease and other life-threatening diseases.

[the redcoat]

5. I understand that

obesity causes an insane amount of health problems.

My issue is that bariatric surgery does not solve the underlying problems. There is no point spending medicare money on these types of surgery. If money is going to be spent on focusing on our obesity problem, it should be spent on subsidizing healthy food for medically obese people, not for people who are sick of making bad decisions.

Maybe you're not aware of the costs we're considering here.

this site: http://www.yourbariatricsurgeryguide.com/cost/
outlines the costs of average weight-loss surgery. It ranges from $17000 to $35000. These don't include post-procedure costs. Consider that 1/3 of American adults are obese. There are roughly 220 mil in that age range, so we're talking about 70 million obese Americans that could potentially be eligible for such surgery. That is a comically conservative $1 trillion spent if bariatric surgery became the acceptable norm.

[BoWanZi]

4. Sure for my own selfish reasons

I'm a fatty as is my wife and I would love it if her Medicaid paid for her to have weight loss surgery. I don't have medicaid but she does.

She has a large amount of health problems such as the funky thyroid, high blood pressure, diabetus, etc.