You're Fat. Let's Cut Your Pay

Here's a real WTF. Apparently the Senate Finance Committee passed an amendment to the healthcare bill that will penalize workers not following a "healthy lifestyle". A blog post on the issue can be found here with links for more information.

Apparently it's unhealthy lifestyles that are entirely to blame for skyrocketing healthcare costs. At least, according to the idiots in government that is what is causing the problems. It's like the lack of standardized tests are the root of our education problems, not the fact that our culture denigrates intelligent people and glorifies people who are more into chugging beer and achieving touchdowns...our current President was actually losing some votes because he wasn't someone that voters would "want to have a beer with". That says something about our population.

I'll make it clear that I think our unhealthy lifestyle in this country is certainly not helping anything with the cost of healthcare. What I also see:

preventative care: poor people who wait until they are literally unable to function before being dragged to the ER are in a far worse spot than people who can go in to find out why that weird mole is changing shape on their chest or why the rash is getting painful.

Bureacracy eating time and resources. The bariatric office I have been working with has a person whose only job is to work with insurance companies. I've heard other doctors complain about having to fight with insurance companies, and read about doctors that have had to choose between diagnostics for people or letting them go without certain treatments because insurance companies say they wouldn't need it. Taiwan managed to increase health coverage to its citizens while having the lowest administrative overhead; they did it using smart cards that keep patient records and information, thus lowering insurance fraud, duplication of services and tests.

The cost of healthy living. These arseheads in government are the same monkeys that have a subsidy to corn farmers and tax sugar imports, meaning that the controversial additive High Fructose Corn Syrup...a possible contributor to weight gain...is very cheap and found in just about every @#% thing in the supermarket while sugar, natural sugar, is too expensive and thus harder to find. Gym memberships are out of the budget for many households, especially with today's economy. Eating fresh fruits and vegetables isn't very cheap either. There was just a study released showing how the healthy mediterranean style diet was more expensive than the more calories-for-your-buck Western diet.

Now these arsehats are saying that if you're overweight or smoking or anything else deemed "unhealthy" and not willing to follow some corporate shill's idea of a wellness program, you could get dinged with an increase in your premiums. In a time when people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and are barely able to even get a job, somehow this is going to give incentive to become healthy. Here's a bit of news: making people miserable in the workplace isn't considered healthy living.

Do you think stress will help with health costs?

Do you think misery and stress don't contribute to being overweight? Or strokes? Heart attacks?

Don't you have a responsibility to be consistent in the first place...i.e., stop giving tobacco companies a free pass while at the same time penalizing the tobacco consumers?

What about lifting the taxes on natural food sources like sugar, and instead shifting some of that corn into alternative fuel uses instead of using them as a primary ingredient in McNuggets?

What about taking action to make it cheaper to eat fresh vegetables and fruits instead of salami and Twinkies? The government has no problem artificially manipulating the cost of things like milk and corn. Why not make it so I can buy fresh vegetables and lowfat ham and bread for my meals for less than the cost of a cheeseburger and McD's, all things considered?

No, no. These mustn't be considered. The real problem is that in a time when we're struggling to pay our bills, we need to add one more reason for employers to hate their employees and give another justification to cut costs by trimming headcount when employees, miserable and stressed by yet another pressure at work, aren't trimming their waistlines. All under the guise of "personal responsibility."

I didn't see it mentioned that people who are living a "healthy lifestyle", whatever definition they come up with for that will be, being rewarded. I only see punishment in the material mentioned at the original article. You're fat? Well...that goes into your record. Don't shape up and you might just happen to get let go at the next round of pink slips.

This sounds more like a federally legal way to discriminate. I really hope this gets slammed into the courts and the first person hit with this discrimination wins big. Maybe one day those arseheads on the hill in local, state, and federal governments will learn to get their heads out of their collective rectums and actually focus on something more important than whether or not Bob in accounting is twenty pounds overweight, or at least stop propagating the myth that there's one overarching cause to the healthcare costs.

Hmm...why is it that when discussing health costs, it's never at all the fault of the insurance companies that are making billions of dollars a year? It's never paperwork, it's never bureacracy, it's never making preventative care affordable, it's never our culture glorifying the lifePstyle of gluttany and excess, it's never linked to stresses and poverty? It always seems to be that it's because Bob is eating too many Twinkies. And it's conveniently Bob's fault. So now they're going to penalize Bob.

When I think of it like that I can't help but picture someone handing someone a chocolate bar then giving them an electric shock whenever they take a bite of it, or those oddball countries that managed to get laws that make selling sex legal but purchasing it illegal. Huh?

There are times I'm so fed up with dealing with the intricacies of human interactions that I want to just separate myself from everyone and live in an earth-bermed home in the woods all off the grid. I couldn't possibly be the only person that finds all of this to be ridiculous, am I?