Healthy people cost taxpayers more in medical bills over their lifetimes than smokers or the obese, a new study has found.

Because they tend to live longer, the savings that they make the state in youth and middle age are wiped out by the high cost of dealing with lingering diseases of old age like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
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By contrast smokers - who pour millions extra into government coffers by purchasing cigarettes - cost the state the least because they tend to die younger.

According to the research, a person of normal weight costs on average £210,000 over their lifetime, a smoker just £165,000 and an obese person £187,000.

The study, led by Pieter van Baal at the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and Environment, found: “The underlying mechanism is that there is a substitution of inexpensive, lethal diseases towards less lethal, and therefore more costly diseases.”

Link (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/05/nhealth105.xml)

Because they tend to live longer, the savings that they make the state in youth and middle age are wiped out by the high cost of dealing with lingering diseases of old age like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.I hope that when I reach "old age," which isn't very far in the future, we will have more compassionate laws in America that will allow me to be put out of my misery if I get some horrible identity-obliterating disease like Alzheimer's. I watched my mother lose "herself," calling my wife of (then) twenty years by my first wife's name, not knowing that my father had been dead for five years, having no idea what was going on in her life or the world at large. I do NOT want to go out that way!

I also do not want my estate to be dissipated by keeping me in an expensive institution. I want my money to go to the charity that is specified in my will, not some greedy nursing home that keeps my empty shell breathing.

Maybe also because healthy people are more health conscious, so they go in for their yearly exam such as pap, mammogram, prostate, yearly dental.