Your first para got me thinking that there was a cost punchline coming. It did . From the cost stand point it doesn’t make any difference does it whether a disease is your fault, my fault r nobody’s fault. The truth of the matter is it’s people trying to control other people and frank hatred of smokers isn’t it.
No, I don’t think insurance companies are trying to control anything other than their bottom line. People have a choice, they can smoke all they want but there are consequences in that there will be a higher payments.
I agree that the outrageous taxes put on cigarettes is a method to control smoking. I think that is totally wrong.
Actually my husband tried to tell me the same thing about parachuting. That was a hobby of his before we had a child. If he listed it as a hobby, his Life insurance payments would have tripled. He tried to tell me that insurance companies just hated parachuters. I didn’t buy it :-) I think insurance companies have spreadsheets, and they know what costs them money and what doesn’t. There’s no emotion in it, it is all very calculated (pun intended). They weren’t trying to stop him from parachuting, but they knew it was a dangerous hobby and they had a higher possibility of having to pay out to the claim.
At some point, if it was deemed legal I imagine insurance companies would look at our family histories and then decide what to charge us. Or maybe even do genetic testing.
But it may not be cost-effective for them to go through all that.
I actually find statistics fascinating. It was my least favorite math class, but they are interesting. So I did a little bit of research on actuarial work. It’s very cut and dried, just numbers. It’s people angry about those numbers that try to put emotion into it. If you look at it logically, and remove any personal impact, it makes sense.