Quote:
Originally Posted by BeanCounter
I could see national health care if they went about it appropriately. Set a community rate for a healthy lifestyle. If you smoke there's a 30% surcharge, if your fat then it's a 40% surcharge, smoke and fat it's 50%. If you live in California where earnings are high there is a surcharge for that. After all we don't want to subsidize well off people's health care on the backs of the poor in Arkansas and Mississippi. They're human too and have a right to health care without subsidizing the upper class. I could think of dozens of other equalizing factors also without even getting into genetic testing.  |
I have gone off on this before but here I go again. This "Fat" tax is pure BS. Not all people choose to be fat, but there is no distinction when people talk about it. There are multiple medical and hereditary conditions that cause people to gain weight. My wife has a Thyroid disorder. When her Thyroid quit working properly, she went from 125-135 lbs size 7 to 260 size 22 in about 3 months. She did not even realize anything was wrong and everyone just assumed since she stayed home she was a fat lazy housewife. Once you open the door to that, you open the flood gate. Since African Americans are more prone to Cycle Cell Anemia, should they have a higher premium? Why not require cholesterol testing for everyone and charge those with higher cholesterol a higher premium, they obviously eat nothing but greasy hamburgers (This is the exact same line of thought, only thinking about 1 possible cause and lumping everyone into that). What about conditions like diabetes, it runs in families, so if one family has it, they pay more? If you are going to require higher costs for issues that COULD be attributed to a medical condition, how do you distinguish what conditions are chargeable for? Where is the line drawn? Congress will test that line everytime something does not fall into the budgets. Funny how their yearly raises fall into the budgets every time.