Don't Hire Fat People!

This is a rather inflammatory title to a blog entry. The real issue comes from this article at the diet blog regarding employers being compelled to pay for weight loss surgery.

Long story short: overweight cook at a pizza joint is hit in the back with a freezer door. Overweight dude needs back surgery to fix the injury and solve chronic pain issue. Overweight dude's doctors refuse to do it unless he loses weight, going from pre-injury 340 pounds to 380 pounds post-injury. Employer says he'll pay for back surgery, but not weight surgery.

So they go to court, and the court says pizza people, you're paying for both.

Hmm...

The blog entry is asking whether this should be the case, whether they are obligated to pay for the weight loss surgery.

My take on it, as was brought up in the comments, is that court cases like this are going to be used as justification for discrimination against fat people being hired by employers who can't afford the health costs.

As a fat person I was asked when interviewing for one job whether I would be "able to handle" moving building to building for my job requirements. There was a definite undercurrent of "we see you're qualified, probably overqualified, but we're concerned you're too damn fat to do these things."

I'm well aware that I've cost my current employer, or at least the healthcare system, additional bucks from having surgery. The upside is that I would have cost them more with ongoing treatment of diabetes, cholesterol, hypertension, etc...and the ensuing costs that come from the comorbities.

(Personally many of these costs I also write off to their bureacracies ending up costing WAY more than things should; have you heard of Taiwan's healthcare system?)

In the end, though, the effect will be the same. Fat people won't be hired because they're a liability. They'll tell you there's another reason. There's laws to prevent such discrimination. But how do you prove it unless you're actually told to your face that you're too fat for the job? Are you recording the interview? And if you're in the position that you're looking for a job in the first place how do you afford to hire a lawyer to fight that kind of discrimination, assuming that by some miracle you happened to have a case that could be proven in the first place?

What do you think? Should employers have to pay for such surgeries?

Or is it going to be shared by the majority of people anyway, since costs to health insurance providers ends up getting passed on to every other customer (or employer) anyway? Or in some cases to the government, who in turn taxes the hell out of all of us anyway?