> What if there were a clear imperative on the part of a variety of industries to keep this population as unhealthy as possible - so they can stripmine their assets for "healthcare" ?
It's not clear that living a healthy lifestyle reduces healthcare costs, it can actually make you more expensive to care for.[1][2][3]
Diabetes medications and death from sudden heart attacks are cheap. Healthy people who live into their 80s/90s are the biggest drag on the healthcare system. They spend more of their lives as retirees. They end up needing 24-hour care. And then they still incur the same end-of-life causes as the obese/smokers... they get cancer, they get heart disease, alzheimers, etc.
Smokers and obese are inexpensive to care for in terms of lifetime cost. The best-case scenario for an insurance company is that you get hit by a bus or something. Barring that, I think they might actually prefer that you be a smoker or become obese.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/9359212/Obese-an...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.97488...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/22/alcohol-...