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Japan Imposes "Fine On Fat"
An anonymous reader writes "A recently-introduced law in Japan requires all businesses to have mandatory obesity checks (video link) for all their employees and employees' family members over the age of 40, CNN reports. If the employee or family member is deemed obese, and does not lose the extra fat soon, their employer faces large fines. The legislated upper limit for the waistline is 33.5" for men, and 35.5" for women. Should America adopt universal health insurance, could we live to see the same kind of individual health regulations imposed on us by the government? By comparison, the average waistline in America in 2005 was 39 inches for men, 37 inches for women."
Do you smoke?
Do you drink?
Drug tests?
Any of this sound familiar in a survey from your insurance application or work orientation pack?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Well wow, that's just dumb. Didn't they read that smokers and fat people cost the government less thank skinny people?. The study was done by the Dutch, and their healthcare is mandatory private (like people are talking about for the US) supplemented by socialized healthcare for people who are elderly or unable to otherwise function, so I'd think they'd have a pretty good idea of what the costs are. //Sorry about the stupid dashes. Goddamn system isn't taking my paragraph breaks.
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Sure, the smokers and fat people have more health problems, but they have the decency to drop dead and not linger on the government dime, senile and incontinent, for a few extra decades.
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I try to keep healthy, but when I hit the point where I'm not enjoying life much any more, I'm eating whatever the hell I want, taking up heroin. I'll be mainlining viagra II, and having sex with the kind of scary women that'd have sex with me! You see these articles coming out of Florida about old guys getting arrested for trying to buy drugs, just for the hell of it, and I don't understand what the problem is. This society is so fricking weird; god forbid you threaten your own ability to live to 110.
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Life is one of those things where it's really about quality, not quantity.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Well, too much in this country is made about BMI. If you're 6 feet tall and weigh 200 pounds you can be a chubby guy or a really fit guy or somewhere in between, but regardless the government classifies you as "overweight". You need to set a standard for health that doesn't deal with weird metrics like "waist size" or "body mass index".
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Even with private health insurance, those who live unhealthy lifestyles have the net effect of increasing insurance premiums for everyone.
The insurance companies maintain profitability by selecting price points that set them ahead, given all of the expenses they are likely to incur. The more fat people they have on their plans, the more likely they are to spend money on all the fat-related medical issues that arise, so the more they must charge.
While it may be unfair to target fat people (or smokers or drinkers or what-have-you), isn't it equally unfair to make healthy people pay a lot of extra money to support the unhealthy lifestyles of their neighbors?
As usual, this door swings both ways, and it doesn't matter whether the health care is universal or privatized...any kind of medical insurance raises these issues.
That's what happens when you buy "insurance" to cover every little thing.
Insurance should cover catastrophic, unforseeable events. You buy car insurance so that you have coverage if you get t-boned by a semi. You don't buy insurance to cover your oil changes. It would be absurd, and if everybody bought oil-change insurance it would drive the cost through the roof. Yet this is what everybody expects from health "insurance", and guess what happened, the costs got driven through the roof.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
"We don't know how much it would, but studies from cigarette taxes show that increases costs decrease consumption of even highly desirable things."
So fewer and fewer people are getting what they desire, because other anonymous people don't desire it and would like to force them into a position where they can't afford their desires! What an idiotic and indefensible notion.
"Obesity increases fuel consumption -- the obese eat more (more food transport and production fuel use) and weigh more (more transport costs in themselves)."
If they can afford the food, who's to tell them they should be allowed to eat it. What happened to "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness"?
"And yes, their health care costs us -- we should be getting some of that back."
Only if you choose to be part of the system. The difference between that and a publicly-funded system is that you have no choice.
"A small tax..."
It is not the size that matters. Forcibly taking away someone's productivity (in the form of money) is no different from theft.
While it may be unfair to target fat people (or smokers or drinkers or what-have-you), isn't it equally unfair to make healthy people pay a lot of extra money to support the unhealthy lifestyles of their neighbors?
So, what if I have good genes.... and you have bad? If we are willing to open up the can of worms of risk assignment, then why should we ignore science and not surcharge those people who have doomed genetics? What, exactly, entitles people with weaker genes to a health discount at the expense of someone else?
This is my sig.
What it comes down to is simple: the ends are nice, but they do not justify the means. Forcibly taking away a portion of someone's productivity because they want some choice as to what they do with their body is a violation of their rights as human beings.