The private healthcare industry would go bankrupt. I sometimes believe that the healthcare industry does to humans, what ORKIN® did to the state of Hawaii. +5

wow! those are the things that make life worth living! (just joking!). these things, in the aggregate, likely total 1/2 of our $2,500 billion a year. of course, to properly prevent and control these factors, we'd have to invest another $200 billion. then, we'd have extended lives on social security that would cost $125 billion and medicare would cost another $100 billion. eventually, these self-abusers would require intervention for "natural causes" which would eat up a lot of what's left. so, they cost a lot now but they'll cost a lot later. we've gotta work on other things as well, like administration, defensive medicine, etc. too! great point!!!

There wouldn't be a health care debate. The medical community, including doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies need and want sick people. The government doesn't want people to live forever; it costs too much. If they truly wanted people to live long and not get sick, they would encourage or even enforce basic common sense practices, as above.

You left out illegal immigrants and their free healthcare. 20 million people make a great impact on healthcare costs to you and i.

Healthcare would be alot and i mean a whole lot cheaper, but this will probably not happen for a long long long while. It is even possible that people would no longer need healthcare insurance because the prices would be low enough to afford, so it is possible that insurance companies would go belly up completely.

While all of the problems you listed do contribute to the high cost of health care in the U.S. they pale in comparrison to the real scourge of the healthcare system. Greedy lawyers who sue doctors and hospitals for every little thing therefore driving up the costs of malpractice insurance. If there weren't so many damned greedy malpractice lawyers in the United States ready to sue for hundreds of millions everytime a doctor screws up health care would be alot less costly.

Why don't you just go a little further and eliminate all the anorectics and bulimics, those with mental illnesses and birth defects, those with genetic disorders and maybe even those who don't look like you and you could have a perfect little fourth reich. I see that you are believing the whole pop culture thing that the only reason for those problems is a lack of character. Truthfully, those who use drugs and alcohol are frequently, not always but frequently, those with mental illnesses who can't afford to see a doctor and get treatment for their disorder, so they self medicate with whatever seems to keep their demons at bay. As for obesity, I think when researchers finally get off their high horse and stop blaming TV and fast food, which coincidentally came into play at the same time, and start looking at the impact of the vaccines and antibiotics that were invented at the same time, they'll come to understand the underlying cause of the obesity epidemic. There are an awful lot of us living today that would have died in childhood if we'd been born a few years earlier. Childhood diseases used to pick off those kids who had weak immune systems, but in the last sixty years, we've survived to adulthood thanks to modern medicine. That doesn't mean we are healthy, it just means we've survived. We've survived with asthma and allergies and metabolic disorders and all sorts of problems that plague us. Our illnesses make it difficult to stay healthy enough to exercise. They make us so tired that we can't stay on our feet long enough to cook in the evening. A healthy body doesn't want to sit. A healthy body doesn't want bad food. But when you are exhausted and sick all the time, you can't do everything you want to.