Consumer Confidential: Insurer refuses gastric surgery that could save man's life
Norwalk resident Shawn Alvarado started packing on the pounds as a teenager, gradually becoming one of millions of Americans whose sedentary lifestyle made him a statistic in the country's obesity epidemic.
By the age of 24, Alvarado weighed 300 pounds.
By the age of 31, he weighed 400 pounds.
Today he tips the scale at almost 500 pounds.
"I don't know what to say," Alvarado, now 53, told me. "I just stopped exercising. I got heavier and heavier."
Still, you don't get to weigh a quarter-ton by simply overeating. There are almost certainly other factors at work, both physiological and psychological.
Yet Alvarado's insurer, Minnesota-based
