DID you know that the community’s failure to eat enough fish oil tablets is costing Australia $4 billion a year? We know this because it is enshrined in the latest research from Deloitte Access Economics: Fish oils for the secondary prevention of Coronary Heart Disease.
Deloitte Access had found last year obesity was costing the nation $58.2 billion, so the crisis in fish oil pales in comparison. Still, $4 billion is a large sum, one eminently suitable for a headline.
You may already detect the faint tang of a fish cannery.
The Deloitte study was commissioned by the Complementary Healthcare Council of Australia (CHC), a body that appears to be funded by the likes of Pfizer, Swisse Vitamins and Blackmores.
The press release on the research, dutifully reported by the press, quoted CHC executive director Dr Wendy Morrow thus: ”The report has found that the Australian community could be saving up to $4.19 billion, in terms of costs related to disease burden and premature life loss, through the preventive use of fish oils in Australians with heart disease. This research is of major significance to the industry, government and to the health and wellbeing of the Australian population.”
Deloitte arrives at its $4.19 billion figure by putting a value on a ”statistical life”, a life that might have been saved had the victim of heart disease consumed the right dose of fish oil before he or she passed away.
While it is tempting to suggest Deloitte Access analysts have been forgetting to take their primrose and echinacea supplement for the treatment of chronic assumption-making, they do say this $4.19 billion of ”net benefit” arises only if all people with chronic heart disease were to take their fish oil.
The cost benefit analysis notes this is unlikely for a range of reasons: affordability, awareness and individual preference. In fact, the Deloitte ”base case” assumes a 50 per cent take-up rate and a net benefit of just $1 billion.
Far be it for the CHC to focus on such frivolous detail when it is calling for government to subsidise fish oil via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, not to mention provide an exemption for the $230 million in GST paid on its members’ fine products.
Gilding the statistical lily is de rigueur for peak bodies pursuing policy agendas. But it is worth noting the huge headline numbers that follow this kind of commissioned research are designed to get governments to spend public money. They merit scrutiny; particularly the ”burden of disease” methodology of the Deloitte Access research. The ”statistical life” logic was harpooned by actuary Geoff Dunsford last year.
Access Economics had done a report for Diabetes Australia, The growing cost of obesity in 2008: three years on, in which it estimated the cost of obesity to Australia at $58.2 billion. Some $50 billion of that was due to ”burden of disease”, a calculation of ”years of life lost through disability and premature death”.
These large estimates of ”non-financial costs” were meaningless, said Dunsford, citing analytical flaws in the ”burden of disease” model.
Less sophisticated observers (yours truly) prefer the ”good old common sense” model (GOCSM) under which it seems obvious that if big eaters and smokers bite the dust before the rest of us, then taxpayers don’t have to fund their retirements and free bus tickets.
In another study skewered by Dunsford, the statistical life of a smoker was valued at $2 million, based on $53,267 for value of a statistical life year (VSLY). Cost to society was $31.5 billion, according to the Collins and Lapsley study.
An obese person’s life was priced by Access at $6.35 million, and $266,843 for a VSLY.
In its fish oil foray, Deloitte Access put the Value of a Statistical Life Year at $151,000, which indicates the life of a non-fish-oil eater is not nearly as valuable as that of an obese person, though both are worth a deal more than a smoker.
How to value the life of an obese smoker with an aversion to fish oil. Do we simply add the VSLYs together?
Elsewhere in the fish oil report, the ”cost” of acute coronary syndrome is put at $18.3 billion in 2010. Three-quarters of this is the value of ”burden of disease” and just $5 billion is attributable to financial costs that can actually be identified.
Jumping, as the peak body for the oil derived from aquatic vertebrates does, from a non-financial cost estimate to an actual hit to GDP is, well, fishy.
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.