Sorry for pinging you so much.
If employers are going to be paying the health insurance then they have the right to do this. Health insurance used to be a bonus incentive. It's now regarded as an entitlement. Beggars can't be choosers. Flame away.
"Employers are realizing the majority of health costs are spent on a small minority of workers,"Ya, like pregnant women...
I understand where they're coming from, but why stop at smokers?
How about checking out where you have lunch and make sure you're choosing healthy meals instead of high calorie, high cholesterol choices. If you brown bag it, how about lunch bag inspections each day!
Forget about alcohol while at lunch (is that even done anymore), don't indulge in the evening or on weekends!
That should cover all the bases.
How about not hiring homosexuals who refuse to stop having homosexual sex? NOTE: they are not being denied employement for being "born homosexual", they are being denied employement for recreational sex practices which have a high likelihood for impacting health care.
How about employers who require all employees be sterilized in order to prevent any form of maternity leave? or pregnancy which increases health care costs? How about just saying ALL employees are not allowed to have sex, EVER.
Well, isn't that special. At my former employer's, there were 2 cancers (not smoking related), an obesity (massive human being), a devastatingly ill newborn, pregnancies every year...none of the smokers are experiencing health problems. They might some day, but the competition for illnesses is fierce.
Not to mention all those parents who go or take their kids to the doctor over every twitch and sniffle. They're also culprits. They go because the visits are "free". Morons.
Automobiles kill. We should stop driving!
Next is to fire coffee drinkers? After all, heart disease has the second highest death rate. Oh, and let's not forget the hikers. I mean what if they fall and break a leg while hiking through rough terrain. What about drinkers? Those execs who like to have power lunches and throw in a martini or two... nope, gotta fire those too. Fatties gotta go too! I mean look at how much THEY cost in health insurance. Maybe employers can have weekly wiegh ins, to guarantee employees haven't started putting on a pound or two.
Ridiculous. People can hire and fire who they want, but they better be prepared to take the good with the bad. I know alot of very capable, intellegent (I don't give a damn what Boortz says) who smoke. Especially in high stress positions. They better be prepared to lose them too.
At a huge department meeting, before hundreds of employees, a peronnel spokeswoman got up to go over the changes to benefits for 2005.
The major change was this: smokers will be charged an extra $60 a month for health insurance. If you lie about being a smoker, and die, you will not receive your life insurance payout.
She then turned the meeting back over to the department SVP, an English gent in his 50s. His comment: "Well, at least we still have drinking!"
Where I work there are so few smokers that it is easy to forget about smoking. What is this, the 99-1 rule? They are going to expend effort and interefere with personal matters to deal with what has become a receding habit of a miniscule percentage of people? Liberal idiocy has infected corporate thinking way beyond what I would have ever imagined.
sure my employer has every right to tell me what I can cand cant do on my own time in my own home as long as they pay me a minimum of 5.25 per hour for evry hour that i am away from work. if they arent going to do that then they need to STFU
I gotta tell ya, I'm gettin' a real big kick out of this.
well, let's. are we going to let corporate fascism design the least costly person? How about a clone with no civil rights?
I am so weary seeing paragraphs like this one with a total absense of any supporting scientific data, both forensic and statistical.
To verbalize one suspicion: When there is pathology, and the victim is a smoker, no attempt (to my knowledge) is made to identify the actual cause of the illness or death but it is assigned to smoking. Whether this is laziness, convenience or just plain ignorance is irrelevant.
That "employers" are focusing of smokers, as opposed to, say obesity-heart disease or AIDS or other "lifestyle choices" is equality irrelevant.
Valid Science is never the result of consensus. But consensus is the main ingredient in bigotry and superstition.
This is good policy as long as many employers stop hiring fat people and people who eat sweets and McDonalds. Oh, and people who stay up too late and drink more than 1 drink/day. OH, and stress is a helth problem too. Anyone that doesn't have a good marrige or has teenage kids should be fired.
The waffle house in our area tried no smoking for about a month. When I ask a waitress why they decided to allow smoking again she informed me that they had over a 50% loss in business on the night shifts.