Nothing is perfect, but most experts believe this has little to do with healthcare today because healthcare interventions tend not to be effective causes of long-run weight loss and most countries aren't doing enough of the stuff likely to have large effects (e.g., surgical interventions) to explain much of the variance. Even if you could argue it might explain something, say 0.5 mean BMI points, other factors are clearly highly important. Cultural * and genetic factors are likely to play a significant role amongst high-income countries. Further, obesity rates rise with time and income levels despite higher health spending.
https://i0.wp.com/randomcriticalanalysis.com/wp-content/uplo...
> socialized healthcare does a better job of controlling obesity with preventative health measures
evidence?
> As it is now in the U.S., patients only go to medical professionals when there is a problem
The US spends more on preventive medicine than almost any other country, though preventative medicine generally has very-small-to-modest effects on outcomes and rarely, if ever, saves money (usually quite the other way around)
~ RCA
note: * some of these "cultural" factors may be residual economic influences... the US escaped the malthusian trap long before almost all other high-income countries and this may have latent effects on attitudes towards food, diet, etc)
It's telling that, whenever the government (rarely) enacts laws that tax or ban consumables with negative externalities, they actually target the right thing. After troves of empirical evidence, they heavily taxed smoking and banned trans fat (I'm aware of the government's misguided early endorsement of trans fat vs. saturated fat, but science has progressed a lot since then). Recently, local governments have tried to tax excess added sugar. That has been less successful, but it's guided by the right thinking. Excess sugar in our food supply is unequivocally, empirically bad. The government has less of a basis to tax it since it's not paying for all our healthcare, but that would change under M4A. Moreover, there would be more money behind nutritional/health research, because that research would have a more tangible payoff: an approximate dollar amount saved in public healthcare expenditures.