Daniel Oliver: Fighting obesity is best left to the individual

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that 65 percent of U.S. adults are overweight and 30 percent are obese. The proportion of those who are obese has doubled in the last decade.

Last week the CDC held a conference in Washington, "Weight of the Nation," (I didn't make that up) to "provide a forum to highlight progress in the prevention and control of obesity through policy and environmental strategies." Thomas Frieden, the CDC's new director, reported, "Obesity and with it diabetes are the only major health problems that are getting worse in this country, and they're getting worse rapidly."

That's the progress he's highlighting?

Here's the frightening part. Frieden also said, "Reversing obesity is not going to be done successfully with individual effort." What does that portend?

The CDC says on its Web site: "American society has become 'obesogenic,' characterized by environments that promote increased food intake, nonhealthful foods, and physical inactivity."

The message is: We are not responsible for our behavior. Advertisers are. That was, more or less, the thesis of John Kenneth Galbraith's "The New Industrial State," published almost a decade after the Ford Motor Co.'s unpopular Edsel model had refuted it. Two decades later, New Coke proved Galbraith wrong again.

According to the CDC, "The Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity (DNPAO) is working to reduce obesity and obesity-related conditions through state programs, technical assistance and training, leadership, surveillance and research, intervention development and evaluation, translation of practice-based evidence and research findings, and partnership development." Whew!

But as the CDC has already told us, DNPAO has not been successful. What appears obvious is that obesity cannot be controlled through "policy and environmental strategies" designed by government.

There is, however, one strategy that might work: Having people pay, out of their own pocket, for their health care and their health insurance and, presumably, paying more for it if they are overweight.

Eating is fun. Eating too much is more fun. Paying higher medical bills or insurance premiums for being overweight is not fun.

President Barack Obama's plan for socializing medicine will produce more of the "progress" the CDC and Frieden speak about. By socializing the cost of bad behavior, Obama's plan will increase it. As will having obesity recognized as a disability under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

We need a free market health care plan, which would not only be less expensive and fairer but would also encourage the healthier behavior that has eluded the CDC's "policy and environmental strategies." Making people pay for their own behavior might also reduce the incidence of AIDS, vehicular accidents and lung cancer.

Those are largely voluntary diseases and account for a huge proportion of America's health budget. The medical cost of obesity alone is about 9 percent of all U.S. medical costs.

We Americans think of ourselves as being self-governing. But what does "self-governing" mean if we can't even stop stuffing ourselves?

And incidentally, or really not incidentally, why should government (or perhaps just "we the thin people") care if some people want to eat themselves into an early grave? We care, now, because we're footing the bill.

In the socialist paradise -- some may call it Obamaland -- no one is responsible for anything. But everyone pays for everything.

Once, a long time ago, on another continent, among a different people and for many decades, socialism was also tried on a grand scale. It produced poverty and scarcity. But not much obesity.

Daniel Oliver is a senior director of the White House Writers Group in Washington, D.C., and editor of The Conservative Agenda Project. He served as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Ronald Reagan.