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Re:Ozempic Shows Anti-Aging Effects in Trial, Reversing Biol... by jfim on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @03:22PM (#44802966)
What are the incentives for people to be fat, out of curiosity? Do you mean farm subsidies for corn, for example?
Re:Ozempic Shows Anti-Aging Effects in Trial, Reversing Biol... by const_cast on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @03:49PM (#44803357)
At a low level, yes, corn, but at a high level: more consumption = more money.

Everyone benefits from you being fat. Your doctors, your car manufacturer, food manufacturers, everyone. Except maybe health insurance. But they're not hurt too too much.

Re:Ozempic Shows Anti-Aging Effects in Trial, Reversing Biol... by criddell on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @04:09PM (#44803599)
Health insurance is helped too. Insurance is regulated and insurers can only hold on to some percentage of the premium. I think it's something like 20%. That 20% has to cover their costs and is the source of their profits.

The other 80% must be paid to healthcare providers.

This means that if health insurance companies want to make more profit, they have to increase premiums so their 20% cut grows and they can only do that by increasing healthcare spending.

Well, there are other ways. For example, Aetna owns CVS, UnitedHealth owns OptumRx, Humana owns Humana Pharmacy, and so on. They get to pay themselves to provide healthcare. This provides a big incentive for insurance companies to want drug prices to increase. They can raise premiums and collect profit on filling those expensive prescriptions.

Re:Ozempic Shows Anti-Aging Effects in Trial, Reversing Biol... by XorNot on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @06:51PM (#44805471)
There is no doctor on Earth who goes to work and thinks "thank god for fat people or I wouldn't have a business".

There's plenty of doctors and surgeons who wish there were less fat people, because they enormously complicate doing surgery on and managing in hospitals.

Re:Ozempic Shows Anti-Aging Effects in Trial, Reversing Biol... by const_cast on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @09:02PM (#44806482)
> There is no doctor on Earth who goes to work and thinks "thank god for fat people or I wouldn't have a business".

I agree, but this isn't how incentives work.

Ultimately, there are billions of dollars at play here that rely directly on obesity. The mechanisms of the market and human behavior transcend moral judgement.

Re:Ozempic Shows Anti-Aging Effects in Trial, Reversing Biol... by koolba on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @12:01AM (#44807493)
> There is no doctor on Earth who goes to work and thinks "thank god for fat people or I wouldn't have a business".

What about everybody that works in liposuction?

Re:Ozempic Shows Anti-Aging Effects in Trial, Reversing Biol... by KPGv2 on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @09:44AM (#44811938)
You mean the job that makes an irreversible removal of fat from your body? Repeat liposuction is considered unsafe, so you will find very, very few people who want to predate on someone via lipo.

They want to "fix you," too.

Re:Ozempic Shows Anti-Aging Effects in Trial, Reversing Biol... by SchemaLoad on Wednesday August 06, 2025 @01:12AM (#44807921)
It's not that there are incentives for you to be fat, but there are incentives for things which happen to cause you to be fat.

The car industry is a huge one. Making people drive everywhere means more car sales, more fuel sales, more infrastructure built for more cars. And it also makes you fat as a side effect.