Originally Posted by Cizungu

I see your point, and you are correct to some degree, but that doesn't change the central observation: we spend much more on health care than any other Western country : there's a gap of over 5 GDP points between us and the next most prolific spender, France. That's a huge difference! To provide some scale: 5% of our GDP covers slightly more than the Pentagon budget.
This huge overspending outweighs by far any of the health penalties entailed by obesity and drugs. With all that money, if we allocated our health care spending as efficiently as Europe, we would be the healthiest people on Earth, with the most doctors, hospital beds, etc. But, despite our profligate spending, we are in relatively poor health, and have fewer doctors and hospital beds than other Western nations.
Or, to take a different approach: as a hypothetical, if we could get solid data and use it to statistically ignore the ill effects of obesity and of drugs, we would probably rise into the middle of the pack--all that overspending would still be wasted, since we would only be as healthy as everybody else.
In other words, with or without taking into account our various health penalties, we're clearly spending too much on health care, without actually providing adequate health care.