Why do fat people cost the taxpayer money?

I won't bother to link to any articles, because I'm sure you've seen plenty of them over the last few years - and it won't be long before the media once again tells us that obesity costs the health system/education system/road system/prison system/economy eleventy-seven trillion dollars per year in additional costs. We are then enjoined to lose weight, happy in the knowledge that doing so will reduce the burden on the public purse.

Given that every leader in the free world is currently spraying money at their respective economies like a staggering drunk sprays piss at a piss pan late on a Friday night (hold on to something with your free hand, then wobble like you're fronting Midnight Oil), why should anyone be concerned with trying to save money? Big fat tubs of wobbling lard should be knighted for their services to the economy in these times of need.

New ambulances have to be bought to transport hefalumps to hospital; to convey the beefy; to transport the stout; to ship the thickset; to transfer the distended; to cart the pudgy; to freight the fleshy; to move the meaty; to offer passage to the porcine; to undertake the removal of the rotund; to truck the weighty. All this costs money. To say nothing of the costs for bigger beds, portable cranes to move the inert from bed to trolley and the rebuilding of toilets and showers to provide more room for rinsing them down.

That's just the health care system. I'm sure you can think of many other areas where the corpulent and the bovine and the burly can cost as a wedge of readies, and thus resuscitate our flaccid economy.

Treasurers should stop moaning and learn to love the large. Woin Swan has spent 6 months trying to spend the surplus, when the answer is staring him in the face - spend the surplus on the swollen.

If you have a rationalist mindset like me, your first thought is likely to be this:

What in the living fuck is the government doing providing any of these services in the first place? It wouldn't have to worry about providing certain services to lard arses if it simply didn't provide those services to everyone - the fat, the bulimic and the ordinary. Governments would make life a lot easier on themselves if they just said, "We're not doing that anymore. It's not our job. Goodbye."