Posted on 07/20/2006 4:35:25 AM PDT by rdax
A new WSJ.com/Harris health-care poll indicates growing U.S. support for charging higher insurance premiums or out-of-pockets medical costs to people with unhealthy lifestyles.
The online survey of 2,325 U.S. adults found that 53% of Americans think it is fair to ask people with unhealthy lifestyles to pay higher insurance premiums than people with healthy lifestyles, while 32% said it would be unfair. When asked the same question in 2003, 37% said it would be fair, while 45% said it would be unfair. Healthy lifestyles were described as not smoking, exercising frequently and controlling one's weight.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
... OR, accept a lower benefit.
The bottom line is this, if you want someone else to pay for your hospital bills, they should have the right to ask you a lot of questions and rate you accordingly.
All you people that applaud seat belt and helmet laws, hope you enjoy the full implementation of nanny state society.
Just tired of windbags, like you, pontificating about others. It is a free society, which you apparently do not believe in.
Equating illegal behavior with legal behavior is mixing appleas and oranges.
BTW, our health insurance offers discounts on premiums for non-smokers, those without weight related issues, and regular well visits. We get 2 of the 3 discounts.
In a free society, heath insurers would be able to rate people with high risk behaviors with higher rates.
If you were asking ME to pay for your health insurance, I should be free to ask you all sorts of question and rate you accordingly. Only in a socialist nation would that be prohibited.
Nevertheless, most fat people keep on eating packaged food loaded with sugar and artificial chemicals, and they wonder why they are fat.
Btw, being fat is itself enough punishment. I don't mind sharing the insurance costs with fat people.
You will begin to see more of that. But the problem is that most of the health insurance is paid by employers or the government.
The only way to get the end users to change behavior is to make THEM pay more, not just their employers.
With your accusations based on nothing, I'll bet you were a big fan of Germany in the 1930's. Obviously, you feel part of a "master race". You really are pathetic.
It is worth pointing out that most insurance categorizes people into broad risk groups e.g. auto insurance. For better or worse, some risk factors are legally allowed to be considered while others are not. This regulation has the effect of forcing some risk spreading onto the insurance company, but it also causes the insurance companies to use legal proxy metrics that catch individuals who are not a risk. For example, ethnicity is not allowed to be a risk factor for auto insurance even though there are significant statistical differences, so the insurance companies use residency neighborhood demographics to infer ethnicity and adjust risk accordingly regardless of actual ethnicity.
That said, I've known a few people that actually worked on the actuarial software for insurance companies in Canada and the US, and supposedly some technically illegal metrics do get factored in on the sly at some companies to make them more price competitive in some market segments.
Just trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.
I guess you have no excuses now.
Excuses for what dimwit?
These people don't even stop to think about what they are saying any more do they...
I am in the health club business and make my living off of people who have been making very poor lifestyle choices.
One woman quit working out and dropped the nutrition plan when we tried to cut her down from ONE two liter of pop per day from TWO. (and this was not diet pop)
She later got gastric bypass surgery, paid for by her employer's health insurance company.
I can guarantee you that if SHE had to pay for the surgery, she probably could have stopped drinking so much Coke.
On the flip side, over the last 4 years we have helped eight people lose over 100 pounds. They did it by determination and self-discipline.
If they had free access to gastric bypass surgery, you and I probably would have paid for it in higher taxes or insurance rates.
Not really arguing with your post per se, but your math is incorrect. People that die early incur most of their life's medical expenses early, which is much more expensive financially to the insurance company than people that push their expenses out a few decades. Remember, insurance is a financial instrument both for you and the insurance company, and the benefit pool grows exponentially with time. Medical expenses a few decades out are significantly discounted compared to medical expenses now.
To put it another way, a difference of twenty years in an incurred medical expense gives the insurance company (before expenses) approximately ten times(!) the benefit money to work with independent of premiums paid over that same period. The "break even" benefit money available grows exponentially, so people who get sick and die later greatly reduce their net impact on the insurance money pool because in most cases their premiums have compounded to value that far exceeds their medical expenses.
The medical insurance company does not break even on your life until you've lived several decades, with the specific benefit/premium structure determining where that break even point is on average. The premiums need time to compound.
If this was true, insurance companies would give DISCOUNTS for smoking and obesity.
There is NO evidence to support your claim that obesity and smoking lowers the nation's health care costs.
So this would be means of coercing people to seek the services you offer.
If people took my advice, it could put me out of business.
If the country quit smoking, who would need a "stop smoking" counselor?
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