Posted on 07/22/2010 11:15:40 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
“who would have the power to remove them to clinics.”
Hitler would approve. You can take the Nazis out of Germany but you can’t take the Nazi out of Germans. Ein volk! Ein Reich! Seig heil!
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OBAMACARE will want this too. Early voting is under way in Tennessee, get out there and VOTE!
In a mandatory health care system where everyone is covered, which is where we are headed in 2014, fat people no longer cover the burden of being overweight, which includes higher cases of knee replacement, diabetes equipment, heart operations, and a checklist of other problems. Instead of paying for his or her choices, the current system allows a fat person to increase costs to the "system" and pass on his or her stupidity to everyone else.
That means a guy who does everything right, takes care of himself, saves his money, and is in great shape has to pay higher taxes to cover a mandatory medical system to pay for an idiot who is 300+ pounds overweight and made poor choices. That is the definition of socialism - when you take from one person who works to subsidize the stupidity and poor choices of another.
Normally, the free market takes care of it. If you have a mandatory health program, though, it screws with the system so you have one of two choices: Either
1.) appeal the health care system and let everyone survive on their own, or
2.) tax those who cost more, like an insurance company does to teenage males, and pass the savings on to those who cost less, like an insurance company does to 40 and 50 year old mothers who are far safer drivers than average.
If mandatory health care is repealed (which will be impossible with Obama in the White House), then taxing fatness would be wrong because the free market will take care of it. As long as it remains in place so there is no downside or disincentive to obesity because we are all picking up the tab, the only other choice is to tax it.
I have a problem paying for other people's choices. I have a right to smoke and drink myself to death but if I expect other people to cover the cost, it is theft. So ... either repeal health care or tax fat people. But if you keep demanding that responsible, hard working adults subsidize others who are foolish, stupid, or lazy, the rubber band will only stretch so far before there is a backlash.
You aren't "defective" because you're overweight anymore than I am "good" because I have money or "bad" because I come from the South / Midwest. Our life is the sum culmination of all the choices we have made up until this point in time. Some of them are good, some of them are bad.
As long as we own those choices, everything is okay. The problem comes when people start demanding their friends, family, neighbors, and fellow citizens pick up the tab. Morality has nothing to do with it, it is about justice and fairness. A man should be able to determine his own future and destiny, not have society impose it upon him. If I start smoking tomorrow, you shouldn't have to worry about your taxes increasing because of my bad choices. The current system forces that to happen and it is wrong.
EXACTLY.
Amen. And I say that is completely and totally worth it.
The health care industry should work like the free market. A teenage driver pays many times more in car insurance premiums than a 40 or 50 year old mother because he is more likely to get in accidents. No one argues this is unfair; why should the responsible subsidize the irresponsible any more than is absolutely necessary for society to function?
With mandatory health care and ever-increasing medical entitlements, my bad choices now get added to the national debt. The free market has been taken completely out of the equation. Short of repealing these entitlements (which I don't see Congress *ever* having the political will to do because they are cowards), the only way to keep from destroying the currency and bankrupting the nation is to mimic the free market by creating a system where everyone has to effectively pay for his or her choices.
If I cost the "system" 3x as much as average (which is really you, your family, and your children because there is no "system", only future taxes), I should have to pay for it out of my own pocket. To expect you to cover it is socialism. That is the definition of the word. Unless entitlement spending is repealed, the only way to do that is to charge on a per-person basis for services used. It is an imperfect solution but better than the alternative of printing money until it is worthless. (If you can figure out how to repeal the entitlements, then all of this is a moot point.)
What about anorexics and bulimics?
That is a very good, valid, intelligent argument. With the shorter lifespan, perhaps the higher operations cost less than chronic care or medications would over several decades.
You would need to factor in the income taxes paid for the longer lifespan to get an accurate reflection, and probably discount the cash flows back to the present, but yeah ... that is a good point. (Because you could get into a situation where someone costs the system $[x] times more by living longer but they also paid $[y] more in federal, state, and local taxes over all those years, offsetting their costs to some degree.) It would take some time and a roomful of PhD's to do the calculations but it would be interesting to find out the answer!
Good question but since that wasn’t the topic. I will wait judgment until they do a possible tax on that. lol.
Tall people are known to earn a bit more salary on average. It's because their brains tend to have more volume so height is a visual indicator for brains. It's not fair! Using the BMI, which doesn't work for tall people, is a way to tax them. It's a height redistribution tax.
There's nothing leftists won't envy and create a penalty tax for. Leftists are especially driven mad by visible size differences. Leftism usually starts in childhood with "your slice of birthday cake is bigger than mine!" and progresses to "Your SUV is bigger than mine!", "Your house is bigger than mine!", "Your family is bigger than mine!", etc.
My point was that you can’t stop at fat people if you are going to jump on board the Obamacare wagon.
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