Originally Posted by
WonderMonkey
The only way you could even come close to factoring in health costs is that if you know you have medical costs and they clearly go away or reduce as you become healthier.
Yeah, I prefer to just stay healthy. Actually you could probably estimate it statistically. In fact it has been done, I don't know about dollar-wise but there was a study that indicated that the health benefits of cycling outweighed the danger of getting killed/injured by 20:1. You may be able to extrapolate that into dollars if you went to the original study and figured out what health problems were avoided, and how much living with heart disease for 15 years costs.
Sure, some people wouldn't get heart disease anyway. But with the US health system the way it is these days, if you're one of the people who avoid it due to exercise, you probably just avoided a few hundred thousand dollars worth of medical expenses at least, not to mention whatever price tag you care to attach to being healthy for 15 years rather than being unable to be physically active and having to spend time in hospitals, etc.