Fat, Unhealthy People To Pay More In Insurance
Detroit Free Press - Smoke, eat, sit on the sofa. You'll probably keep your job, but you're likely to pay more for your health insurance.
With health insurance costs rising an average of 12% last year and 8% this year, employers across the country are struggling for some way to continue offering medical coverage without going broke.
That has companies taking a long, hard look at some of their most costly workers -- those who smoke, overeat and don't exercise.
Most businesses have rejected a Michigan company's controversial solution to simply fire all of its smokers early this year. But the idea of requiring employees to change their unhealthy habits -- or pay more for their insurance -- is gaining favor.
At some companies, such as Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. and Navistar International Corp., smokers pay more for health and life insurance. At others, workers who participate in healthy-living programs get discounts.
At Jackson-based manufacturer Orbitform, for example, workers can have their health insurance premiums cut in half if they take a health-risk appraisal and agree to meet with a health coach twice a year on company time to work on monitoring and improving their health.
"They can chose not to take" the appraisal, "but then they pay 100% of their health care benefit," Orbitform President Mike Shirkey said. "There's no one telling you you have to do this. ... We have 100% participation."
I don't have much of a problem with this.
Health insurance is, basically, like a big game made up of lots of little wagers. On every insured person an insurance company is basically making a bet that you will need less money for health care than what you pay into the system. Which, on the face of it, is a pretty good system in the beginning. Everybody, for the most part, paid the same amount into the system. The dues paid by the majority of mostly healthy people offset the money paid out for those who fell ill or got hurt leaving enough money left over to pay expenses for the insurance company and maintain a decent profit margin.
Now, however, the cost of medical care has skyrocketed far above what most people could pay out of pocket. Medical insurance has moved from being a nice fringe benefit to being a necessity for anyone with common sense. The side effect of this is that insurance companies can no longer afford to treat most people the same. In order to keep the system solvent these companies have to start charging those who are more at-risk for health problems more for their coverage.
Granted, the fact that all those Whopper value meals are going to cost you more in insurance down the line is not a fun reality to face, but from a business perspective there just aren't a lot of other options. And really, this could be a good thing for America. Politicians are always complaining about how Americans are too fat and lead unhealthy lifestyles. They even propose laws taxing unhealthy food and other products for the sake of steering people clear of those things, though most would probably say that those laws are aimed more at bringing in tax revenues than having any meaningful impact on the health of citizens.
Maybe this would be an effective way to wake a lot of Americans up to the way they're living their lives.
Radley Balko has more.
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