There is a significant difference in the state restricting one’s activities to protect other citizens from some reasonable likelihood of harm, and the state restricting your own activities “for your own protection”. Nor do I believe the state can properly “back door” an ability to dictate personal acts affecting only oneself by first volunteering to provide benefits to society at large (like health insurance). That’s a slippery slope we have rushed far enough down already, thank you.

Regardless of the terminology used, things like obesity and Alzheimer’s and heart disease and cancer are on a different level from things like polio or meningitis or influenza or ebola.

The government can step in and require immunizations, or even quarantines, to protect the public at large. They shouldn’t be able to step in and demand you change your diet because you’re too fat.

Spending more resources on patients inevitably involves more providers. Question remains whether high resource utilizing physicians are diffusing claims throughout the healthcare system. E.g. I send patient with atypical chest pain for cardiac cath. My risk for missing a diagnosis based on clinical judgement drops. But the patient has an embolism stroke as a result of the cath, with long term disability. Cardiologist gets the lawsuit, but not me.
Study does not address such a scenario, where I can increase utilization, the patient is exposed to greater risk, but greater risk is distributed among more physicians.
The associations noted in the article are interesting, but still need to follow the patient through the process as the point of analysis to see whether receiving greater resources leads to more/less disability, and more/less use of litigation.

I have never understood why these newspapers don’t just link to the record and some of the main briefs, rather than (or in addition to) inserting all these quotations from interested parties. It would be cheaper and more useful.