Had a friend who needed a knee replacement, but the doc told her it wouldn't last if she didn't get and stay well under 300lbs. So she got a wheelchair instead.
I see a lot of that around here. As much as the leftists on the coast irritated me, most of them took care of themselves. There's a lot of fat people around here. I swear every fifth license plate is handicapped, and every time I go to Costco or Walmart, there's at least a dozen people all tooling around in motorized carts - most all of them very overweight.
I see the same thing in my own family. My sister can barely walk, and most all of it is due to her being fat. If she lost 100 lbs, it would make all the difference, but she prefers to take pain meds and sit on her ass watching TV all day. Hilariously, she always complains that she can't run this or that errand because of her back or feet or whatever, and gets my 90 year old dad (AKA the enabler) to do it, then everytime he goes to her house he sees a ton of sweets and a freezer full of ice cream, which somehow she was able to walk into the store to buy.
To tie into the health care, as we have discussed many times around here, if more doctors cut down on prescriptions as an easy out for both them and the patient, and pushed exercise / physical therapy, there would be a lot fewer disabled license plates on the road.
Certainly there are cases that simply can't be fixed and require some pain medication for quality of life, but I suspect they are a very small number in the population of handicapped placards, disability benefits, and motorized carts at the Walmart. Especially when you see how young some of these people are.
