>They (and other elements of our healthcare industry) already make a lot more than that on treating the side effects of widespread obesity.
This raises a thought I hadn't considered before: given how much money gets made off of obese people, it wouldn't be surprising if there would be significant commercial interests that would want to try to actively hamper anything that'd systematically reduce the overall population percentage of obesity. We've seen plenty of examples in the past (and ongoing) of perverse incentives. In turn, I wonder if it's actually a small silver lining that the drugs are so wildly profitable for the short term, in that the producers are incentivized to lobby against any efforts to legally hobble them. And then in the longer term it will all go off patent.
You also have to remember that not everything is a conspiracy.
Just because someone is making a boatload on a problem existing doesn't mean someone else doesn't want to make a truckload undercutting that business, even if the first business might try to stop it, well, sometimes a different set of bad guys wins.
This raises a thought I hadn't considered before: given how much money gets made off of obese people, it wouldn't be surprising if there would be significant commercial interests that would want to try to actively hamper anything that'd systematically reduce the overall population percentage of obesity. We've seen plenty of examples in the past (and ongoing) of perverse incentives. In turn, I wonder if it's actually a small silver lining that the drugs are so wildly profitable for the short term, in that the producers are incentivized to lobby against any efforts to legally hobble them. And then in the longer term it will all go off patent.