I'm fairly certain that I'm qualified to weigh in (no pun intended) on the higher insurance rates for fat people topic. You may or may not know that in a former life I was an insurance underwriter, working for excess and surplus lines companies running risk pool groups like these fancy new "exchanges" the government has set up for the ACA. That's right, they're nothing new (but that's beside the point). RPGs have been around, and the underwriters that run them know how to handle it. They have their own standards and actuarial tables and data, and they insured high risk and "uninsurable" people a long time ago.
If you're contending that underwriting insurance for fatties will be insufficient because of the health care costs associated with them go ahead and put your mind at ease because it will be nothing compared to the costs for pre-existing conditions. All those cancer babies, preemies, 10 year olds with leukemia...their families should all pay enormous premiums or better yet....nobody should have to insure them because I can tell you that according to the actuarial tables it's not effing possible to turn a profit and insure them.....OH WAIT, that's one of the problems that ACA is attempting - imperfectly, God forbid - to address. See, nothing really changed here, dude. Where fatties like me get a break is in being associated with a giant risk pool like, say, public employees. I don't, btw, get a break on life insurance, just like a smoker or older person doesn't. They don't care about my medical records, just my BMI.
Drop the discussion of how much fat people should have to pay. Health insurance was a huge gamble for everybody to begin with. Seemingly perfectly healthy people keel over and bite it on their way to GNC every day or get hit by busses more often because they won't just drive their damn cars. There's some actuarial nonsense for you. People have tried to be nice about it. Drop it. It's a stupid line of reasoning and a stupid thing to be worried about.
all my love, ursus.
Sorry, last point I promise.
If you reason that people with "lifestyle" problems (read, fatties and smokers) should be made to pay higher premiums because they're costing you money I can only assume you mean through your premiums. Stay with me now, then it follows that the best thing would be to eliminate them from the situation entirely, right? Don't insure them, and don't provide them care and your premiums will go down, right? Wrong. They go up. 70% of the nation is considered Overweight, and not much less Obese. Throw smokers in, too and your risk pool just became really, really small. And that's what it's all about, dude. Risk pooling. Take it on faith for me, just this once, from an underwriter. Risk pooling. Fat people and smokers pay premiums too, and there are shit-loads of us, so your premium costs are not increased because of our presence. Sorry. That's just how the whole business side of it works.....and worked for hundreds of years before the ACA.
Now, the ACA may not fix that. I realize that there are actual medical costs to be considered, and that premiums reflect that. My contention is that the ACA will be able to allow the risk pooling that has always gone on to continue. I believe this because we all made a pretty good living doing it for excess and surplus lines before, and I believe in the ability of those greedy bastards I used to work for to find a way to do this and still turn a small profit. I am, you see, a capitalist after all.
