A Stitch in Haste

To review: The pharmaceutical company Merck bought an executive order from Texas governor Rick Perry mandating that all pre-pubescent schoolgirls be vaccinated against HPV, via Merck's expensive and not entirely effective Gardasil vaccine. This despite the fact that HPV, unlike the infamous childhood diseases of generations past, is not casually communicable in a classroom setting (i.e., there are no positive externalities that justify government compulsion).

The Texas legislature undid Perry's despicable rent-seeking maneuver. Which means they did the right thing -- if only for a few weeks:

Fitness guru Dr. Kenneth Cooper of Dallas teamed up with Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Lewisville, to author legislation that would require schools to monitor students' health to prevent childhood obesity.
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The wording in the bill that describes the required testing tool mirrors language on the Web site for Cooper's FitnessGram, developed in 1982 to measure health and fitness levels of children.
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The FitnessGram would cost about $230 for each child when purchased from its distributor, Human Kinetics. The nonprofit Cooper Institute receives $30 from each sale. ... [T]he Cooper Institute will apply to be the vendor.

First of all, "making money from selling stuff" is hardly my definition of "nonprofit" (cf., the scandalously "profitable yet supposedly non-profit" AARP).

Meanwhile, do educrats, school nurses and PE instructors really need a $230/student test to tell them something that a scale and tape measure can't?

I will, however, give Cooper credit for one thing: he is a far slicker huckster than the marketing department over at Merck:

But Cooper said he believes so strongly in the testing regimen that he is willing to put that money back into the program. He also said he will help raise the money to implement the program, which could cost between $5 million and $8 million.

One must admit, it takes a lot of creativity (and chutzpah) to buy a monopoly franchise from a state government and then repackage it as "philanthropy."

You may have heard that the Texas legislature, along with its counterparts in California and Florida, essentially dictate the educational curricula for the entire nation because textbook publishers have little choice but to produce the books that those three states, at 30% of the market, want to buy. This "Fitnessgram" snake oil may well exhibit the same economics. Even if Cooper "charitably" discounts his program or otherwise "gives back" his "nonprofit profits," he will still have bought, from Texas politicians, a market share that will allow him to undercut other providers of such services (see generally, "economies of scale"). And of course he will be able to ("philanthropically") leverage the Texas contract in his marketing: "Used by all Texas schools...." or "The official fitness program of the Texas Education Agency..."

Like I said: chutzpah.

To the extent that a "War on Childhood Obesity" should be waged at all, it might -- somehow -- be the case that more is needed than a scale and tape measure -- I'm skeptical. But surely it -- whatever "it" is -- can be done for less than $230/student every year, and done in a way that doesn't unduly enrich (reputationally if not financially) a single rent-seeking person or firm, no matter how "non-profit" or "philanthropic" they pretend to be.

(Via Junkfood Science -- which peeks under the hood of the "FitnessGram" program and finds it -- to use its own terminology, "underfit.")