Soon, this guy might be penalized for his valiant triumph.
You knew it was coming sooner or later. With Congress so desperate for ways to trim health care costs that Nancy Pelosi recently spent an entire day investigating whether or not the writers of "House" could fix everything, the idea of charging overweight people more for health insurance was bound to pop up sooner or later. And while it sounds nice to say that healthy lifestyles are actually being "incentivized," making those incentives permanent simply results in different insurance prices for different weights. But despite the potential for the creation of a de facto fat tax, legislators are inching closer and closer to an insurance model based on Safeway's own experiments with just such a system:
Nevertheless, lawmakers from both parties, as well as President Obama, are getting onboard with a Burd-inspired plan to help employer-sponsored insurance plans penalize fat people and smokers with higher premiums. The "Safeway Amendment," which was added to the Senate's health care bill earlier this month and has been proposed in the House, may soon end up as federal law....
Even if the Safeway incentives did encourage healthy behavior, their implementation would almost certainly be unfair. Much of the criticism of Burd's amendment—and there's been plenty—has focused on the ways in which the program might single out people who are already impoverished. As I've said before, being poor can make you fat, and being fat can make you poor. Rates of obesity and poverty are closely linked across the country, and—among women, at least—the more money you have, the thinner you'll be.
The decisions made in Washington are really interesting sometimes. The feds have attached a Giant Money Hose to the industry that gives us high fructose corn syrup, but discussing those subsidies on Capitol Hill is like saying Voldemort's name out loud at Hogwarts. And if our fearless leaders really wanted to cut health care costs, they might want to think twice about punishing overweight people - or even smokers:
The other study I've done is looking at the financial ramifications to smoking for the rest of us. These include higher medical costs on the one hand, but lower social security, pension, and nursing home costs on the other hand because smokers die sooner. On balance if you put those together, smokers don't cost us money, but save society $0.32 per pack.
There have been similar findings in studies about obesity. Naturally, both claims have been challenged by other studies, which are then challenged themselves, and round and round we go on the carousel of scientific one-upism. But if Congress is going to be making decisions about what happens with everybody else's money, it'd be nice if those writing the health care bill were sure about what they're doing.
