Obesity, health insurance, and the Corporation
(Regarding a post from last July)
Blue Cross of California said...
Krugman has a great discussion on obesity and health care. The discussion is very interesting as obesity can lead to higher cost in health insurance.
So true. And as a direct result, corporations (e.g. Wal-Mart and its now-famous memo) are looking for ways to reduce their costs by screening for healthier employees when hiring. Is this an unethical practice - that is, employment discrimination against obese people?
Does it provide incentives for people to stay/become healthier?
Would it be analogous to screen for smokers?
1 Comments:
Yeah it's unethical. The assumption here is that as being overweight and smoking are a choice, it's fine to discriminate, but people from some places and in some environmaents, are more likely to make that choice. Let's take candidate X for a job, X is an 18 year old, qualified, uh, to work at Walmart. X smokes but perhpas she falls into that 30% margin who wouldn't smoke if her parents made another $10k a year.
On a side note, Medicare is no
Anyway, it has been suggested that the whole premise might be off, all your smoking/overeating employees work for 50 years and then die of CHF at 63, saving you millions on pensions. Cha-ching!
PS Free will is an illusion anyway
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