alt Hacker NewsThe obvious retort to this is:
"If I focused on my health, ate clean and exercised daily, why should I also be subsidizing Billy "video-games-are-my-exercise" fatass's chronic health conditions?"
This is why there is a hyperfixation on shifting blame away from (failing) individuals. The logic breaks when Billy has to admit he just hates exercising.
And yes, before you comment, I know "maybe Billy has (condition outside all control) so it's not on him". Please, see what I just said in the previous statement.
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It also fails to take into account the fact that eating clean and exercising daily doesn't eliminate your risk of getting cancer at age 40 or having your car's brakes fail randomly.
Is the obvious retort to this:
I don't think we should play arbiter for who has and hasn't lived a healthy enough life to still believe they should get healthcare?
The entire purpose of health insurance is spreading risk across a wide and diverse risk pool.
> why should I also be subsidizing Billy "video-games-are-my-exercise" fatass's chronic health conditions?"
Nobody is asking you to: enrolling in insurance is a choice in the USA.
Also, replace "chronic health conditions" with "unavoidable inherited genetic risk factors". We don't want Billy to be screwed for life just because he was born to a suboptimal combination of parents.
> "If I focused on my health, ate clean and exercised daily, why should I also be subsidizing Billy "video-games-are-my-exercise" fatass's chronic health conditions?"
Then why are you not asking your insurer why they cover a lot less preventative health or other options. For example, Kaiser flat out refuses to prescribe GLP-1s for weight loss, others insurers are the same with gym subsidies or not covering nutritionists.
But they'll happily pay for your gastric bypass.
In some respects, the ideal world is one in which everyone’s premiums are tied to a free and easy Apple Watch-like device that silently tracks exercise, blood sugar at a frequency that can tell when you ate a big dessert, air quality (and the presence of smoke or pollution), blood alcohol content, whether you are in speeding cars, whether you are participating in dangerous sports, etc. Such a system would directly confront individuals with the cost of their behaviors in an economic way, probably leading many or even most people to improve their habits in the aggregate.
But such a system comes at other costs that most people intuitively feel infringes on core values they have.
Edit to add: this system would actually have some great advantages over an “existing conditions” tax in that now you pay low rates until you have diabetes, all during the time you are leading the unhealthy lifestyle. But once you have it you are not rewarded for starting to exercise and eat healthy and get it under control. In the hypothetical scenario above, you’d be punished economically during the period you were building bad habits and you would be able to restore sane costs after course correction