This study asks and answers a simple question: “Does Health Insurance Make You Fat?” Jay Bhattacharya, Kate Bundorf, Noemi Pace, and Neeraj Sood, NBER [National Bureau of Economic Research] working paper no. 15163, July 2009. (Thanks to Grover Weston for bringing this to our attention.) The authors explain:
“We find weak evidence that more generous insurance coverage increases body mass index. We find stronger evidence that being insured increases body mass index and obesity.”
Then Came the Book
Two years later that study was published as a chapter in a book, Economic Aspects of Obesity.
Then, This Year, Came the Officialdom
On April 1, 2025, th US National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a press release about the lead author of this 2009 study. The press release headline says; “Jay Bhattacharya Begins Tenure as 18th Director of the National Institutes of Health”. Here is the bulk of that press release:
That press release notes that Bhattacharya was given this position thanks to Donald Trump, who in 2020 was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize. The 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education was awarded to Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.