Speakeasy forum: Smoker's Health Care

Should vegetarians for cholesterol patients?

Should couch potatoes for extreme sport injuries?

ETC.

While I concede your point about smoking, health insurance is an averaging game where the well help pay for the less well, period.

Most insurance now does have higher premiums for smokers. Many are moving to higher premiums for obese. While a choice, I'm not sure obesity is as easy to cure as smoking. I've quit smoking, I'm still overweight.

Should people with healthy genes help pay for those with poorer genes? Now that seems to be an entirely different case, yet insurance companies have used your family's history to deny coverage or charge more I believe.

So where would you draw the line without doing away with cost averaging and affordable (if it is) insurance?

Hmmm, so the opening wasn't about lifestyle but about lifestyle coupled with universal health care plans? The post seem to ask about pricing of one group compared to another based on lifestyle, no mention of whether or not everyone should be provided care. The last paragraph in your reply seems to be taking on an very different aspect, if not entirely different question of health care cost.

Regarding the original aspect of one groups cost compared to another, or a person with poor choice in lifestyle paying more than another, who would you penalize?

That is what unhealthy lifestyles should pay more than you do?

Should some pay less than you do because of their lifestyles?

I can see more prorated premiums coming, certain actions being a plus or minus in determining your health insurance premiums and exclusions. And some of it may be quite reasonable, and even encourage people to life better lifestyles.

I can see it becoming like high power sports cars costing more or cars with certain safety features costing less on car insurance. Or more accidents costing more and a safety driving course reducing your premium. I can easily see the insurance companies taking that route as well as many calling for it.

But I also see prorated premiums based on your genetics or rate of incident of specific diseases in your family tree rather than your actions coming too.

But in a discussion of how premiums should be affected by lifestyle, it may prove difficult to decide when you get pass the clearest choices and start creating more and more subclasses to define each policy holder's risk and use that risk to set premiums. I suspect it would come down to what the odds are you'll get the most expensive to treat conditions. But I'm not sure lifestyle choices will be the only deciding factors. And some lifestyle choices will be classified as detrimental but seem to be so specific as to be dictating your life day to day.

Statistics may prove anything, and they will be used. How fair will it be to decide that only married people with two kids and a pet (from specified list), with no family history of a long list of conditions for at least 3 generations be charged to "nominal" premium. Every deviation from a preferred (ie statistical derived to be the healthiest living choices) set of living conditions will be considered a point against you. Ok, that may be hyperbole, or at least I hope so, but I actually think you will see it moving in that direction.

During our lifetimes, it may move only enough to punish those that really do knowing make bad choices. But such things have their own momentum, especially if some board of directors sees a profit in continuing that direction.

welfare recipients who are unwed mothers? Problem is, it's pick and choose on who gets the shaft and who gets the bank draft.

Right of support, inherited by birth? No room to address lack of responsibility on part of the parents? Financially orphaned? Some right to do something wrong, believing others should pay for it? They don't have any right to tell me how to live my life, but do have a duty to support the way I live it?

Orphanage until the parent can prove responsibility.

That's why we have this morass of a mess. Bad behavior gets the money, good behavior gets taxed more to pay for it. Responsibility is not required of the recipients while those taxed face penalties if they don't support the irresponsible activities. What ever happened to "Beggars can't be choosers"? We have allowed our society to make the working class become slaves to the slovenly, indolent, and promiscuous. If the children should be taken care of, then fine, but don't do it by rewarding the ones who are causing the problems in the first place.

such as "fall off a cliff and you'll get hurt" or "touch a hot stove and you'll get burned", but then socialism came along and we learned that "beggars can't be choosers" actually wasn't a universal rule. Washington showed us that beggars actually can be choosers.

Tax homosexuals at a higher rate too?

Since that's the African birth control practice that results in the same thing as homosexuals in the US do to get HIV.

How would you charge people higher premiums, deductibles, co-pays, etc. when they're not paying anything to begin with?

prominently advertised addiction. People are paying the price for getting hooked in childhood. I still remember kids in 6th grade trying cigarettes, and by high school at least half the school smoked, and that was the 50's and early 60's.

Health Care is Health Care. You may not realize you've been exposed to asbestos (know I have) but 30 years later along comes Mesothelioma the only known cause of which is Asbestos exposure, or Lung Cancer or Emphysema. Do you think that people exposed to asbestos should be denied because they "weren't careful enough".

Roger has it exactly right. You can't go around cutting people off because their life style choices were made at a time when the health effects weren't known.

Additionally as a personal example. I was exposed to second hand smoke for much of my life, particularly in childhood with my parents both of whom smoked, even though they knew I was asthmatic. They did so because there was no data on the effects of second hand smoke. Lots of folks smoked at University, and not just "wacky tobacky". I just got sicker and sicker until I ended up in hospital at the age of 26 for a significant period of time. You want a fun procedure, try a lung lavage. That's where they stick a Y shaped tube down your throat into your lungs and rinse out one lung with saline to loosen phlegm and get rid of other particles, while piping oxygen to the other lung to keep you alive. Then about a week later they do the other lung. Imagine waterboarding, only one lung at a time, and you can't object because it's a medical treatment that will make you better for a time. Thank God for the new generation of drugs, Advair I love you. I may not be able to run, but I can get through my weeks without living on Ventolin every 4 to 6 hours, and it's rare for me to end up breathless.

Rob

No point in charging me for any of it. Just because people made bad choices doesn't mean they should be entitled to share their consequences with me.

and it's those last years that drain the health care system, isn't it? I could guess that, by the time they are treated for cancer, emphysema, and other smoking related issues (including those that might limit their years of productivity), they've already dug well into the money pot being created by the more healthy. I don't know if it's possible to put figures to this but it makes good sense to me.

It so happens I have two nephews with CF who will be in their 20s and 30s by now. The cost of their health care has been astronomical all of their lives and will continue as long as they are around. For us not afflicted, it appears to be a horrible way to live. I hate to consider these circumstances in terms of money but there's no way a person with CF, unless they strike gold in some way, will pay for the entire cost of their own health care and have enough left to cover someone else. I did, BTW, exclude cases with genetic involvement in my first post of the thread.

changed the direction of your OP anyway, so it's difficult to keep track.

May be you should read your own OP again.

Mark