R
Ridgerunner
Guest
Goodness! You should welcome having the obese, etc, in your insurance pool rather than resent them. They tend to die more quickly. Heart attacks and such. I recall a doctor once opining that if we lived long enough we would all die of cancer. Now, THAT’s expensive! If anyone has a basis for complaint, it would be the obese, who drop dead suddenly from coronary occlusion, massive strokes and such, who are paying for you “fit” folks very expensive cancer treatment somewhere down the road.I have mixed feelings about this. First of all, what is wrong with the insurance system is that since we’re a free society and a republic with choices in the hands of consumers, consumers make lousy choices. Take Sam. He eats doughnuts for dinner each night, smokes cigarettes, eats at McDonald’s and downs Big Macs for dinner. He doesn’t walk, jog, exercise, or give a dang about his health. He sits around watching the boob-toob after work. He has diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol.
He has Blue Cross and so do I. I am a vegetarian (I actually am). I am about 20 lbs overweight but I watch my blood pressure, walk a lot, try to stay active, eat whole grains, low fat soymilk, some occasional sweets, low carbs, plenty of vegetables and fruits, organic lifestyle, etc. We both have the same insurance. Gurney is paying higher premiums for Sam. Sam is a deadbeat. Gurney’s health is good except for the occasional cold or allergy flare-up. My premiums are high because of Mr. Slob.
I resent that. I don’t like paying for this guy! Yet when the government tries to tell McDonald’s to knock off the trans fats or harrasses cigarette companies or tries to get restaurants to offer more healthy choices, tea partiers jump off the couch crying socialism! socialism! They talk out of both sides of their mouths? They hate the fact that the government wants to try to make things healthier thus sticking up for the right to eat junk food and garbage AND YET they sympathize with the insurance companies who are raising their rates precisely because of slobs and junk food-inhalers?
If we want to stick with private insurance only, then we need to do SOMETHING to get people to get healthier. This country is obese. I have travelled overseas many, many times. Trust me, people are not all blimps in other countries, especially Asia and Europe. This country is full of wide-load porkers, convenience foods, slop, preservatives, pestacides, and junk. We are a fat country.
Some people, usually conservatives, cry, “education! education! just education people and we won’t have to be socialists telling us all how to live!” and yet trust me, teachers will get yelled at by tea party parents when we try to teach nutrition at school. “I don’t want to raise my boy an organic, tree-huggin’ hippie boy!” that’s the expected outcome. And it does no good to teach nutrition if mom and dad take the kid to the Micky-Dee’s drive-thru after work and pump 'em full of sodium, fat, and blub.
So what do we do?
One option is to raise the premiums on people who are overweight. Set goals and healthy weight cut-offs. If a person exceeds it by more than a few pounds, their premiums go up 40% a year. They could also give discounts to people who go to gyms and get positive physicals, etc. If they are diabetic, they should drop weight and help deal with it. High blood pressure? Drop weight! Exercise. Give incentives, punish obesity, educate, and the government should try to get restaurants to publish nutrition information, ban certain ingredients, drop higher taxes on chains that shovel out slop like the fast food dives, etc.
If we could be pro-active, punish the obesity-makers, get this country healthier, we wouldn’t have to look at things like the public option.
Now, having said all that, what about people with GENUINE health problems? Some folks have cancer, diabetes from birth, lukemia, parkinsons (like my mom), injuries, you name it. Is it fair to refuse those folks with pre-existing conditions and throw them out in the cold? The Far Right would say “yes” without batting an eye. It’s all $$$, business baby, not a moral issue at all.
We need a balance. and the governments, states, should play a role. As long as we have to be in this as a team with insurance, then as Hillary said, it takes a village. The day that we have insurance companies that only insure one person, then we can have the luxury of keeping government and common sense out. But the world we live in has massive pools of people grouped under one insurance provider and the healthy have to pay for the slobs. Republicans stick up for the right to be a bum, are ok with the sky-rocketing obesity and crisis, and sit on their thumbs with corny plans like tort reform that are somehow going to change the whole scope of things. Nonsense.
that somehow the drinking water or aliens are responsible for us all getting fat.