40% of American adults are obese. Obesity causes heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer. Diseases raise a person's health care costs. Costs do not make that person obese.
It's also not a head tax, because healthy people don't pay it. Obese people need to accept personal responsibility for their condition and stop trying to leech off the system.
Dr: "Stop eating burritos and soda or you will need insulin"
Average Joe: "Ok just give me insulin."
Type 2 is largely reversible by diet and exercise. But people would rather just eat burritos and be sick.
Also, you stated that poor health is the cause of high US health care costs and that's not true, either. It's one of the many conctributors.
Also also, healthy people do pay it if they have health insurance and/or pay taxes that contribute to Medicare/Medicaid.
I agree that obesity is a problem though. I also believe that many of these articles about the American healthcare system falsely attribute poorer health to our healthcare system rather than at least partially attributing it to unhealthy lifestyles.
I think the way it's presented in the article ("health outcomes") strongly implies that healthcare quality in the US is not as good as other countries with lower costs.