A common attempted “justification” for the healthcare inequalities that fat people face is the idea that fat people shouldn’t get the resources they need if they happen to need more resources than the average thin person. When added to a general focus on profit (especially in the US healthcare system) this leads to staff-to-patient ratios that make it impossible to correctly care for fat patients (for example, having adequate staff to safely turn patients to prevent bed sores or help them ambulate to improve post-surgery outcomes.) It can also mean not having the supplies that these patients need in order to have the best outcomes. Some examples are InterDry to prevent/treat skin fold infections or Hoyer lifts so that they can use a commode and avoid bedpans and chuck changes (both of which are made more difficult and dangerous for the patient and more likely to create negative outcomes when staff-to-patient ratios don’t allow for adequate care, even if the practitioners aren’t coming from a place of weight bias.)

All of this, in turn, can create practitioner bias when they blame higher-weight patients rather than the healthcare system that is leaving both patients and practitioners without what they need.   

When healthcare facilities are allowed to decide that they don’t want to spend the money to give higher-weight people the care they need, or they are not adequately funded to do so, then higher-weight patients suffer. Here again the negative impacts of this are often simply blamed on “obsity.” For example, research on post-operative complication rates will often suggest that “obsity” causes higher complication rates without exploring the ways that these size-based healthcare inequalities may actually be at the root of any elevated rate of complications.