Higher insurance premiums for the overweight

[Proud Pies]

[KenH]

[watt price tully]

[Skids]

Shouldn't the OP title be "Discounted health insurance if you look after yourself"?


Mr Fitzgibbon said if the government accepted the recommendation, NIB would look to offer discounts to members who �pursue better health behaviour, like not smoking and losing weight".

He said a discount could be offered to people with a body mass index below a certain level, or who took action to reduce their weight.

�Obviously offering a discount based upon weight loss is slightly trickier," he said. "It may well be ... that we offer a discount if somebody actively participates in a weight management program."


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/overweight-people-could-pay-more-for-health-insurance-nib-chief-mark-fitzgibbon-20140504-zr4b6.html#ixzz314t9x54y

[stui magpie]

[David]

[Tannin]

So you honestly think that an insurance company offering a discount to people who reduce its costs because they look after themselves is "disgustingly moralistic"? Really?

Explain to me, please, how that is different to an insurance company offering a discount to people who drive carefully and don't have so many accidents?

It seems to me that the two are exactly the same, and I challenge you to demonstrate otherwise.

[Skids]

I don't get what you're complaining about.... If someone chooses not to smoke and lives a healthy lifestyle they are rewarded with a reduced health fund premium and you've got a problem with that?? Bizarre to say the least.

[Skids]

And what are you doing talking sense tannin

[Wokko]

[Tannin]

By the way, the original Medibank/Medicare scheme aimed to provide universal health care to everyone at no cost. (Or "at equal cost" if you count the taxation which pays for it.) If you want to argue that health care is a special case and that we should return to the ideals of the original Medibank, or to something like the UK National Health system, I am very much open to that.

Where your argument fails, David, is that you are trying to mix and match the notions of universal health cover as something the state provides in return for taxes, just as it provides universal education and roads for everyone to drive on and defence forces to keep everyone safe and police and courts for the same reason, with the individualist, devil-take-the-hindmost notions which underlie user-pays healthcare and insurance.

Before you paint yourself into an even sillier corner on this, you need to clarify your thinking. Which model do you subscribe to? And why are you trying to apply precepts and practices from one model to a completely different model where they make no sense?

[pietillidie]

Of course, David is still right to fear in a certain sense, because as the exaggerated self righteous attitudes in this debate show, the notion of "user pay" easily moves from private choice items to taxes. This is the real slippery slope to be aware of.

Once people become so fanatically convinced everyone else's ailments and difficulties are self-caused, they start fantasising that they ought to be able to spend their taxes how they want. Yet this is always an exaggerated, fundamentalist nonsense.

To give an example within the context of this thread, surely by now everyone knows full well that a substantial (perhaps even the vast) proportion of obesity is only superficially caused by bad diet or a lack of exercise, and frequently fundamentally caused by depression, anxiety, personality disorders, stress, poverty and time poverty, genetics, systemic health issues, socially-rooted ignorance and poor behavioural patterns, and so on.

These things are not in a person's control in the same sense choosing a flavor of ice-cream is in a person's control. And the more we learn about these things, the clearer this becomes. (For the 99th time, people need to stop confusing the essential "I did it my way" and "I think I can" stories we tell ourselves to create a feeling of control and efficacy, with the known scientific and social facts).

My guess is that these issues underlie David's fear, and it is an extremely rational fear because most people are too irrational to keep the public and private insurance concepts separate in their minds, just as they can't seem to keep the social good and the private good separate in their minds.

Hence, there is always pressure to create two-tiered systems which negate the progressive taxation system so people "get what they pay for in taxes". This is not a paranoia, it is a permanent feature of the aspirational class and certain individual psychologies.

We should never forget the same sort of self righteousness and lack of empathy and rational analysis turned the US into a cesspit of poverty and social polarisation, and, ironically, resulted in them paying more for their health system, not less.

Thus, private insurance companies can do what they like and that's a separate argument, as I myself hastened to point out somewhere above. But beware the sinister sleights of hand where both private companies and private citizens who actually rely on the government's resources and infrastructure, and who often actually did have much better hands dealt to them than their neighbours, claim they did it all alone and as superior humans deserve more.

[David]

I more or less agree with your stance, Tannin�I'm happy for there to be a divide between public and private health, and I'm generally happy for private health insurance to do as it pleases so long as it does not behave in an unfairly discriminatory manner.

The private sector isn't somehow quarantined from discrimination law. Private insurers can't just do whatever they like. Given the importance of having an egalitarian society�which, if I recall correctly, you're generally on board with when it doesn't involve fatties�you surely have to at least agree that private companies ought to be treading carefully with this stuff. Indeed, in many countries it's illegal for private health insurers to discriminate on the basis of gender or other metrics.

Again, I don't necessarily disagree with the idea of private health insurers taking a completely risk-analysis based system and discriminating on any metric possible. But when they try to mix discrimination with egalitarianism�essentially saying people from Social Group A deserve to be the exception to the rule because they supposedly brought their problems on themselves�the results seem to me to be very ugly indeed.

For me, they can't have their cake and eat it too (so to speak). They can't just have a general rule and make an exception to it for one or two social groups that seem like easy targets. It wouldn't fly if they were singling out Aborigines, LGBTI people or women, and I simply wish to apply the same standard to another social group that already gets treated pretty roughly in our society and doesn't deserve a policy like this.

[Wokko]

[pietillidie]