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It's mostly obesity. If we allowed for obesity as a reason to deny health coverage, then health innsurance would be affordable. And since it costs nothing to l

• Pulcinella 9y ago
  If we allowed for bad opinions as a reason to deny health coverage, then health insurance would be affordable. And since it costs nothing to post better, it seems fair.
  • ams6110 9y ago
    No need to go full denial. Insurance is priced according to risk. If I've got a record of accidents and traffic violations then my car insurance costs more. If I'm 100 lbs overweight and hypertensive then life insurance costs more. Medical insurance can be priced the same way, creating incentives to maintain a healthy weight and diet.
    • logicfiction 9y ago
      I don't necessarily disagree, but I think you start getting into challenging grey area with pre-existing conditions. Is being overweight a consumer responsibility but an auto-immune disease isn't? How do you effectively draw a line between disease or health risks someone should be responsible for versus not.
      • ams6110 9y ago
        Well ideally you have insurance before the "pre existing" condition exists (or is discovered). However in general I think pre-existing conditions need to be handled by something other than "insurance" and the trick is to do it in a way that doesn't incentivize people from foregoing insurance until they get sick.
    • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      Hey, if your family has a history of cancer, they should also charge you more right? It's only fair.
    • Mz 9y ago
      The problem with your theory is that driving is optional and not something we engage in 24/7. Being alive is a continuous thing and we don't understand all the myriad things that contribute to stuff like weight gain. I was seriously overweight for a time. It did not get better until I was diagnosed with a genetic disorder and began getting proper treatment for that. Until I had a proper diagnosis, my body just did not seem to work the way everyone told me bodies worked. I ate healthy. I exercised regularly. I was well educated and well read. Yet my problems seemed to defy solutions for a lot of years, until I finally got the right diagnosis. Most people who are overweight wish they could solve it. They often don't know how, even after taking all the usual advice. New research into things like gut biome is beginning to cast light on such phenomena, but this is hardly a solved problem, contrary to what many people seem to think.
    • taeric 9y ago
      Insurance is priced according to risk, yes. However, most insurance is priced against fairly good odds that they will not pay to an individual. Which ultimately points to health care being a relatively stupid place to trust to an insurance market.
• majewsky 9y ago
  > it costs nothing to lose weight Citation needed.
  • cgag 9y ago
    Don't buy so much food.
• 542458 9y ago
  > since it costs nothing to lose weight, it seems fair. This is only a half truth. Starving yourself is free, but losing weight while still eating a variety of foods (most people can't stomach 24/7 lentils) on extreme financial (including preparation equipment) and time constraints (prep time, time to get ingredients) is nontrivial. Look at the nutritional content of the cheapest and most readily available food you can find (fast food, walmart-brand sausages, etc etc etc). It's typically full of fat and sugars. Higher-quality readily available foods are typically more expensive and harder to come by in poorer areas. Higher-qiality food you prepare yourself is an option, but learning how to do as such is nontrivial and the time investment to prepare these foods can be a major challenge for some.
  • noir_lord 9y ago
    It's not that hard with proper planning (I did it, I lost 70lbs). Takes 20 minutes for oven to eat up and 12 for pizza to cook. In 32 minutes you can cook a healthy cheap meal with variety. I ate porridge for breakfast, cottage cheese and salad for lunch and and chicken/veg, fish/veg for evening meal.
  • lr4444lr 9y ago
    No one's responsible for anything anymore. What you're saying essentially amounts to poverty preventing people from shedding a disease of affluence.
• mrkrab 9y ago
  I completely disagree with losing weight "costing nothing". A good diet is usually more expensive than a bad diet. Preparation also requires more time, which is money. Education on what you have to eat, how to cook it, etc. is money too. Exercise requires free time, which is money too. Hence why poor people have higher levels of obesity.
  • antisthenes 9y ago
    I agree completely, but most people could go 80% of the way just by eating 20% smaller portions of the same food they eat right now. Does it cost more to cook smaller portions? I think even worst case scenario is it costs the same, e.g. you cook the same amount and throw 20% away (or it goes bad). What would help is if people stopped treating weight loss as some insurmountable problem.
• taeric 9y ago
  Even assuming that this was true... the logic doesn't even make sense. If you have fewer people in an insurance pool, than the costs of it are higher. Pretty much by definition. You can almost get away with this if you purport that the actual costs of the pool would go down. However, all it takes is one person having a surprise expense to demolish any small pool's planning. Seriously, think on this at a level. Try to go in with just 5 friends to cover your costs for health. Works right up to the first time one of you visits the doctor. Which is to say it doesn't work.
  • jbmorgado 9y ago
    > "Even assuming that this was true... the logic doesn't even make sense. If you have fewer people in an insurance pool, than the costs of it are higher. Pretty much by definition." What? That doesn't make any sense and it's surely not by definition. If you have a set of people, and you create a subset with the healthiest people of the subset (so, what you are doing by removing the obese), of course that the costs per person will be lower for the subset than for the all set.
    • taeric 9y ago
      That isn't how insurance works. To do an insurance pool, you have to have a lot of people, knowing that you won't be paying out to most of them. Otherwise, it is not insurance, but some sort of group savings/pay as you go. That is, the main variable that gets you to lower rates, is higher participation. Anything else doesn't come close. You have to let it sink in that you can not have a small subset "save up" enough to pay for "their share." It just doesn't work without having large groups lose out and be completely unable to cover the costs in their group. Instead, this would be akin to group gambling where eventually one loser will bankrupt the entire pool. Now, there is a related concept that you need to diversify your risk pool such that you don't fall prey to the same risk on everyone. This is what hit some major flood insurance providers after Katrina. I could see similar arguments for not wanting to insure a bunch of folks from the same locale. (Oddly, insurance doesn't typically branch out beyond locales...) There is a concept of trying to get the higher risk pool to pay more through some rough proxies (typically age, for car insurance) to pay higher premiums. Again, though, most young drivers do not have accidents. Nor do the insurance companies typically actually need such high premiums to cover costs. As evidenced by their fairly mediocre savings plans they offer folks for not having an accident. All of this, though, really just points out that calling this an "insurance" for health is just silly and is ultimately the wrong model.
• marze 9y ago
  You assume some factor results in obesity, which the causes strokes. There is no evidence for this. More likely, a common combination of factors causes both obesity and strokes.
• marze 9y ago
  You assume some factor results in obesity, which the causes strokes. The is no evidence for this. More likely, a common factor causes both obesity and strokes.