The CDC estimates obesity-related health care costs $147 billion per year.

I very much doubt America is going to do anything, as a matter of public health policy, that has any appreciable effect on obesity rates in the next couple of decades. Its not that its impossible for governments to hold down obesity; France, which had rapidly rising childhood obesity early this century, instituted an aggressive set of public-health interventions including school-based food and exercise shifts, nurse assessments of overweight kids, visits to families where overweight kids were identified, and so forth. Their childhood obesity rates stabilised at a fraction of Americas. The problem isnt that its not possible; rather, its that America is incapable of doing it.

Obesity: Another thing its too late to prevent | The Economist.