Daily Score Blog

In 2004, total health care spending reached roughly $30 billion in Washington state.  In Oregon, that total was $16 billion; In Idaho, about $5.5 billion.  That's not chump change:  health care now absorbs about one-eighth of the total output of the Northwest states' economies.

And, based on the results of these national studies, and these state-level estimates, at least a tenth of all medical spending in the Northwest is related the ailments (diabetes, hypertension, colon cancer and the like) caused by obesity, overweight, and physical inactivity.

These are, of course, round numbers.  Unless I'm mistaken, there just aren't good, up-to-the-minute estimates of health care spending in the Northwest.  And multiplying the confusion, it's hard to separate out the costs of obesity, overweight and physical inactivity. 

That said, it looks pretty likely that the total, direct medical costs of the obesity-overweight-inactivity nexus top $5 billion for the three Northwest states combined.  And that's just the direct medical costs; it doesn't account for lost worker productivity, worker's compensation, and all of the other indirect costs of poor health brought on by inactivity or overweight.  This report suggests that those indirect costs top $4.6 billion per year -- for physical inactivity alone, and just within Washington state.  That number seems mighty high.  But if it's anywhere close to being accurate, it could mean that promoting exercise and eliminating excessive body weight might boost the region's economy by, oh, about 3 percent.

Or, put differently:  reducing the size of our people might be a pretty good strategy for increasing the size of the economy.

With gas prices soaring, some people may trade in their gas-guzzlers for more fuel efficient vehicles. But don't trust the EPA ratings. A recent analysis by Consumer Reports shows that 90% of vehicles get worse gas mileage than advertised -- in some cases more than 50% worse for city driving. And nationally, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) may be overstated by a whopping 30 percent.

How does this happen? Manufacturers inflate fuel efficiency in several ways. First, they don't test cars the way people actually drive. Vehicles are tested in a laboratory, not on actual roads. And while the EPA assumes that 55% of driving is done in city traffic, which uses more fuel than highway driving, many cars actually spend 62% of time there, according to Consumer Reports. Second, the car they test is not the car you buy. Manufacturers are allowed to use prototypes built especially for the fuel economy test, so they often modify them (within limits) to get the best rating possible.

I'm not sure what to make of this news from the Seattle P-I (and reported elsewhere as well):

Senators condemn oil price 'gouging'
Responding to high-octane suspicions of price gouging at the pump, senators from both parties Tuesday condemned price manipulation but differed over the best way to attack the problem...

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., is convinced that the oil companies have artificially increased prices and wants President Bush to have the power to cap gas prices if necessary. She likens the conditions to those that caused the Enron fraud of the electricity market in 2000 and 2001.

"Absolutely. I just don't have the document to prove it," Cantwell said when asked if oil companies are price gouging.

I don't mean to defend the behavior of oil companies here, and I also don't want to get mixed up in semantics.  But I'm far from convinced that the recent runup in gas prices is actually a case of unethical profiteering.  It seems to me to be simple market economics:  oil and gasoline supplies are tight, and demand is up.  And that dynamic alone -- quite independently of any malicious manipulation by oil companies -- seems to be what's forcing prices up.

An interesting piece of research from Case Western Reserve School of Medicine suggests that students who completed an abstinence-only sex education showed an increase in "their HIV/STD knowledge, their personal beliefs about the importance of abstinence and their intentions to remain abstinent in the near future."

That's a good thing, right? Not so fast. Abstinence-only education changed what students said about abstinence. But it didn't make them any more abstinent -- and worse, it may have encouraged a slight increase in risky sexual activity.

...the program did not affect students' avoidance of risky sexual situations. In fact, female students and students already sexually inexperienced reported a decrease in their intent to use condoms.