There have been murmurs for years suggesting the dirty little secret that the oft-cited health savings incurred by "healthy lifestyles" is a sham. The conventional wisdom for years has been that smokers and the obese should be required to shoulder higher insurance premiums (as well as targeted "sin taxes") to absorb the allegedly higher health care bills they run up. The arrangement has worked perfectly for insurance companies and government who get to isolate a minority of taxpayers/policyholders and hold them liable for a disproportionate share of the financial risk, allowing the nonsmoking, healthy weight majority to pay less. There's just one problem with this pyramid scheme, recently pointed out by a Dutch study. The premise is fundamentally false. The "unhealthy" run up lower lifetime health care bills than the "healthy".....as much as 21% lower.
Here's a link to the study from the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment". http://www.omaha.com/...
That's right folks. This study is NOT funded by "Big Tobacco", "Big Fast Food", "Big Ice Cream", "Big Girl Scout Cookies" or any of the other poison-peddling bogeymen. It's funded by the Dutch government....and suggests that the obese run up 11% lower lifetime health care bills than non-obese smokers, and smokers run up a whopping 21% lower lifetime health care bill. Why? Because they die sooner.
The logic is painfully obvious for those willing to break the chains of insurance industry and nanny-state spin. Lung cancer and heart disease for 65-year-olds is a bargain to finance compared to years and years of intensive care for 95-year-old Alzheimer's patients.
I'm not asking anyone to endorse society smoking and overeating our way to lower health care costs, but I am asking us to accept that we've been hosed into passing on massive and unwarranted financial burdens onto a disproportionately low-income demographic of Americans who smoke or struggle with weight. The dynamic is especially true of smokers, easing the costs of government and insurance for more than 75% of the population by footing an ever-increasing share of the bill themselves. And on top of that, "progressive" Democrats and Kossacks uniformly endorsed another $35 billion federal liability on mostly working-class smokers to single-handedly finance the expansion of children's health care.
The "obese" have not yet been targeted financially the way that smokers have, but we all know it's coming. It's become a financial necessity for government and insurance companies to find a new minority of "villains" to single out. We're told that because of improved mileage standards in vehicles, government is no more than 10 years away from replacing a per-gallon gas tax with some for of per-mile tax to avoid a loss of revenue that would keep our roads unpaved. The same will true of "sin taxes", which have almost single-handedly financed the growth of state government in the last few years. States have become infinitely more dependent on tobacco tax revenue that any addicted smoker is on nicotine, and when the threshold of diminishing is crossed on tobacco taxes, it's inevitable that lawmakers will shift their selective sanctimony to new sin taxes on "naughty food", thus finding a brand new way of shifting tax burden to the lower and working classes.
This Dutch study generated a day's worth of buzzworthy headlines this week because it so boldly defied conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, the study will be buried and suppressed by the media and the powerful corporate and governmental forces who see it as a deadly obstruction to their endgame of forcing low-income smokers and the obese to absorb a massively and obscenely larger share of the tax burden and insurance premiums. I'm surprised the Dutch government even allowed this study to be released given its potential ability to derail the scheme to centrallize financial risk for health care.
It would be ideal if this rare window of candor would stop the trend of forcing poorer unhealthy people to subsidize health care costs for those disproportionately wealthier and healthier than themselves, but I doubt it. The middle-class majority is gonna be just fine allowing those across the tracks to pay their health care bills for them, while continuing to wax sanctimonious about "unhealthy people" costing THEM money. But particularly for all the "progressives" in government (and on this board) leading the effort to raise taxes on low-income Americans with "naughty habits" for based on false logic, this Dutch study should force every one of you to hang your heads in shame.