Higher Risk of Obesity Linked To Health Insurance

Higher Risk of Obesity Linked To Health Insurance in Individual Health Insurance

What? How can you possible link something like obesity to health insurance? Is that insinuating health insurance is some kind of health risk factor?

Not exactly. But it’s an interesting statistic nonetheless.

A group of policy experts released a paper that found the simple fact that having private health insurance raised a person’s Body Mass Index (BMI) by 1.3 points. If you have a public health insurance plan like Medicaid or Medicare, your BMI goes up by 2.1 points, wrote the WSJ Health Blog.

So then, is there really a correlation between obesity and health insurance?

According to a study from Health Affairs, having health insurance encourages obesity because people are cognizant of being protected if they have weight-related health problems.

It seems like a flimsy connection and it probably is. Consider this: the number of uninsured Americans skews toward younger people, who have less weight problems than older folks, which means by default those with insurance will have higher BMIs.

And for Americans who have public health insurance, it’s widely recognized that BMI moves upward as income level goes down.

Bottom line is that having health insurance is no risk factor for obesity.

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