Legislators have been tripping over each other to lead the fight against public smoking, soft drink machines in public schools, and trans fats. In July of this year, for instance, the California legislature passed - and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed - a measure banning trans fats in restaurants and other public food facilities.

Such legislative actions seem to make sense. Health care costs would seemingly be lower for everyone if people took care of themselves from the get-go, rather than seeking crisis care when years of smoking, for instance, revealed their full consequences.

But history shows otherwise. To date, state-run programs to promote good health haven't worked very well. In fact, they've often worsened the very problems they set out to solve and in the process driven up overall health care costs.

In 1994, the federal Nutrition Labeling and Education Act mandated that nutritional and caloric readouts be placed on all packaged foods. The idea was that if Americans knew the facts about what they were ingesting, they'd choose to eat healthier. Between 1995 and 2007, however, the percent of obese Americans increased by two-thirds.

Many "healthy living" programs are based on dishonest or even fraudulent interpretations of medical research. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) once attributed 400,000 deaths per year to obesity; a year later, other CDC and National Institutes of Health researchers arrived at a figure of 26,000 deaths per year. That's a mighty big discrepancy.

Even though some government-funded prevention programs are able to effectively promote healthier living, they're certainly no cure for high health costs.

One obvious reason is that healthier people live longer. Individuals who live into old age require some of the most expensive health care there is: late-life care. As people age, they become more susceptible to illnesses like osteoarthritis, prostate cancer, osteoporosis, and cognitive illnesses like Alzheimer's disease. These diseases make the final years of a person's life incredibly costly.