Higher insurance premiums for the overweight

[stui magpie]

[HAL]

Try it and see.

[David]

[Tannin]

^ Balderdash.

1: it's not "cordoning off", it's simply charging a more equitable fee to account for self-inflicted risk. Any healthy person can maintain a reasonable weight, and unhealty people are high-risk.

2: Society makes decisions on physical characteristics all day, every day. It always has and always will. Want to play football? It's all about your physical characteristics. Applying for a job? Your physical characteristic have a lot to do with your chance of success. Asking a girl out? Physical characteristics again. To think otherwise is to be astonishingly, mind-bendingly naive.

3: Any normal healthy citizen is at perfect liberty to change this particular physical characteristic by, for example, not eating at McDonalds every day, or taking a walk. It is nothing remotely like having black skin or a big nose or red hair: being obese is a choice.

[stui magpie]

^

What tannin said.

Plus, sticking with obese people here, it's medical fact that obese people have more health issues. Life sure is discriminating against them isn't it, surely it should spread the bad health across everyone equally?

Sticking with insurance. Ever tried to get it for anything? Young males pay more than young females for car insurance based on data that says they are more likely to have accidents. Is that apartheid too? Being young and male is far less in their control than their weight.


If you're a smoker and need surgery, watch the anesthetist turn various shades of grey trying to work out how to knock you out without killing you, or even better pass the job to someone else.

David, for a smart bloke you make some really dumb arguments.

[David]

I've written on several occasions in this thread that I don't necessarily oppose a consequentialist system, so nothing you're saying there is new. The point that disturbs me most is not that discrimination will occur (even though there may well be good arguments for a fully egalitarian premium rate). My issue is that consequentialism is being used as an excuse for making an exception to an otherwise egalitarian system.

To be precise, it's one rule for smokers, drinkers and the overweight; one rule for everyone else. Obesity is as much a 'choice' as many of the conditions that might see you offered the regular premium, but it's treated differently because it's seen as an acceptable social vice to pick on. That has nothing to do with the specific consequences of obesity that you and Tannin keep talking about. And if BMIs are the measurements used, as proposed in the article, then it won't just be the physically unhealthy who face higher costs.

Anyway, I think I've staked out my position clearly enough here. Do you support egalitarian insurance premiums or oppose them? Were you aware that private insurance was mostly egalitarian?

From the article in the OP:

[stui magpie]

Your blind spot is in saying that obesity is not in the persons control when in the majority of cases it is in their control and in the cases where it isn't it due to medical conditions, which invalidates your argument.

Lola should be watching the plate when you dish up.

[think positive]

[David]

We're on the same page on that�I also want our society to be healthy. But you don't get that by taking a punitive approach and shaming people for their weight, you get that by giving them the support and dignity to actually seek out these services without feeling helpless and worthless.

Our society has had incredible success in making fat people feel like shit. It has had little to no success in reducing obesity rates. Think about that for a bit.

Stui, WTF.

[Tannin]

You are the one with the peculiar obsession about "a punitive approach" and "shaming people". No-one else has the faintest interest in doing any of those things.

You admit that "Our society has ..... little to no success in reducing obesity rates." Why not admit that making prudent, self-helping people pay through the nose to subsidise health care for sloths and gluttons is one reason why we have had so little success?

[think positive]

[think positive]

[Morrigu]

Slippery slope argument in play here for mine!

Yes many people are morbidly obese due to lifestyle choices - they should pay more!

Yes many people who are morbidly thin have eating disorders or make lifestyle choices including drug use that damages organs and results in adverse health outcomes - they should pay more!

Yes many people drink to excess and some can hold down jobs and pay tax but even if they do their risk of liver damage and resulting health problems are high - they should pay more!

Smokers well - they should just be culled at as an early an age as possible But if you do that they won't pay at all!

High flyers in high stress occupations who look ok ( according to the current rules of society re physical appearance) but whose diet and stress levels results in cardiac arrhythmia or arrest - they should pay more!

Exercise junkies and risk takers who partake in activities that result in physical injury requiring a squillon diagnostic tests that cost a bomb - they should pay more!

Those populations that are prone to specific physiologic disorders for a variety of lifestyle choices but also genetic predisposition - CKD in the indigenous population, Thalessaemia and Sickle cell in Mediterranean populations - they should pay more!

Where should we stop?

The obesity issue is not simply a matter of personal lifestyle choices and shaming people does not work as intervention to sustain behavioural change as it doesn't take into account the myriad of contributing factors - which is why prohibition of anything e.g. drugs, alcohol etc does not work and is why we still struggle to recognise, accept and appropriately treat mental health issues that impact so many facets of our lives.

[HAL]

I haven't committed myself yet.

[think positive]