In another thread you said:
Clearly your analysis lacks compassion, to say the least.
This is different than access to care or rationing of care. This is an employer taking your BP, and perhaps actual pee, to figure out how much you pay for health insurance. Firing smokers - what next “fire all the fatties”? I would not have brought this up, but the approach raises a lot of concerns. Particularly since it’s had sone short-term success, and may be replicated.
I guess I shouldna had that beer with dinner.
Agreed. Luckily I exercise my franchise, and will definitely vote against this sort of crap instead of whinge about it when I don’t vote and it gets voted in by those who do vote.
I would be serously peeved, I can’t do their generic little gym machines, about the only thing I can do is the stuff my PT has me do in the pool. Are they going to pay more than my 18 annual PT sessions for me to exercise. [please note if I were rich, I would actually go to my PT 5 days a week, I love her and I love the PT in the pool. Hell, I would build a pool and hire a permanent PT person to do PT every day of the year if I were rich.]
(emphasis added)
[slightly off-topic maybe?]
At the risk of changing the subject (slightly?): We’ve seen those claims that older single people (males and females alike, I think) have shorter life expectancy than couples. The implication has always seemed to be that lonliness, social isolation and such emotional factors are the cause. I don’t question that. But I can think of another very obvious reason that I’ve never even seen mentioned. (Maybe it’s just tooooo obvious?)
At any time, but especially as one gets older, life-threatening health events and accidents can happen. Stroke, heart attack, slip and fall and break some bones, etc. We’ve seen those stories of old widows found, days or weeks later, laying on the floor in their own pee (sometimes dead, sometimes only nearly so), because they fell and broke a hip bone.
My point: Emotional reasons may account for those statistics that show a few years difference in life expectancy. But a smaller number of more extreme values may skew the averages too. In those life-threatening events, a single person is much more likely to die right then, whereas the coupled person has a much better chance of being saved and living for many more years. I think that must skew the average considerably, and may account for those life expectancy stats we regularly see.
[/slightly off-topic maybe?]
Also maybe people who are not all that healthy to begin with have difficulty finding spouses?
On the OP, IMHO an employer has no darn business asking about, let alone interfering with, any legal thing one does on one’s own time, unless it in some way affects job performance. Yeah, get roaring drunk before showing up for work, or come in hung over half the time, yes, that could be selected against. Mandating exercise? What’s next, outlawing cheeseburgers? How about birthday cake?
This. It seems like we have come full circle. There was a time when society felt like it would be outrageous for employers to tell employees what to do off of the clock. It seems like even 20 years ago people would have been screaming for blood over this.
Now it’s back to 1905 again.
Well, not quite. By decoupling employment from healthcare coughsinglepayersystemcough we could solve this particular issue quite easily.
The Cleveland Clinic approach has saved a ton of money. Any payer - in particular a single payer - would look at this approach and may try to imitate it. So, playing devil’s advocate here, instead of one possible employer mandating this stuff for its employees, it’s the federal government mandating it for everyone.
I think it’s too easy to take this idea to reductio ad absurdam territory. How far should your health insurance payer get into your personal life? I don’t know, but this does give me pause.
Have the employees all in their same-color-coveralls, all doing jumping jacks in unison in the court yard. It’s for their own good.
It looks to me like the CC has saved money by firing, or threatening to fire, anyone with what they consider an unhealthy lifestyle. That is their option I guess, being a private company and all, but to suggest that this system would work on a larger scale is silly.
Besides, its a freaking Clinic, complaining about the high cost of medical care. They can afford to pay people enough to allow this intrusion because they (the clinic) are part of the problem. As the article says, healthcare costs rise 6% a year, which implies the CC’s gross rises 6% year. They can afford to cherrypick those employees with “acceptable” lifestyles. If McDonalds tried this they wouldn’t have enough employees to stay open.
As far as I know, no government health insurance program has ever actually tried anything like this. Why would they try it now?
There does seem to be some support for very invasive “public health” programs, at the very least looking at the kind of health obsession among top politicos in New York and so forth - I’m thinking of people like Mayor Bloomberg. Additionally, questioning how a bureaucracy would choose savings (i,.e., where they dump on citizens and not the bureaucracy).
We’ve had employer paid healthcare in this country for 70 years without companies caring if I drink or smoke OFF of the job. I call bullshit on this being a product of private sector health care.
It’s more of a thing where people are willing to bend over and accept a mandate to do the “in” safe/healthy thing of the day, whether that’s anti-smoking laws, seat belt/child safety laws, low calorie, low carb, high protein, drinking alcohol in the car, etc.
As I said, twenty to thirty years ago the public was outraged at the regulation of those sorts of things, by the government or the private sector. Today, more people have the idea that if it is good for you or if it “saves just one life” then its a good thing.
as you can read here No, Getting Married Does Not Make You Live Longer | Psychology Today single men live longer than men who married and then divorced. Now, divorce rates are real high nowadays, especially for working class men with not enough money and/or intelligence to keep their wife happy and in her place. In short, those long-lived “married men” who weren’t kicked out of the house (not yet, at least) are a distinct group based on many variables. To describe their marital situation as the key to their longevity is an example of torturing the data until it confesses a political agenda.
What “health obsession(s)” are you talking about, specifically?
I never said it was a product of private sector health care (though it’s pretty telling that it hasn’t happened in public sector care). I said the problem could be solved by getting rid of employer paid healthcare.