Doing none of those things has been shown convincingly to, on average, shorten your life by at least ten years.
I see. Exactly how dangerous would you say an activity has to be in order for employers to withhold health insurance? Smoking causes around 400,000 deaths per year; car accidents cause around 40,000. Heart disease causes around 700,000, so shouldn’t factors that contribute to heart disease be cause for withholding health care?
One of the biggest, if not the biggest risk factor in heart diseas is smoking. And, unlike, say, eating, smoking is not something that anyone has to do. It could be argued that driving is unavoidable in the United States, given that public transportation coverage is so poor, especially in rural areas. Even still, high-risk drivers are heavily penalized by their insurers.
High cholesterol, being overweight, not exercising, and eating a lot of fat are also major factors. The latter two are definitely personal choices; the first two are debatable.
No one has to eat fatty foods or sit around instead of exercising.
My point is that driving is a risk in itself, and so are these other activities. If you’re going to let employers penalize employees for putting their health at risk by smoking, it’s only logical to extend that to other risks.
We may get to the point that certain foods carry warningss, but we’re not at the stage yet where junk food has labels on it like “Twinkies Kill”. No one has quantified, so the extent that they have with smoking, the socioeconomic impact of Twinkies. I doubt that kind of data is going to be available for a while. Also, you can’t do blood tests for Twinkies. There’s no practical way at all to monitor Twinkie consumption, so far as I know. As a food, the FDA does not regulate Twinkies in any way near the same manner it does tobacco products. They’re just not the same thing, in any way, shape, or form.
The risks involved with smoking are beyond all reasonable doubt. Smoking is entirely voluntary. Speaking with my financial advisor the other night, I found out that her life insurance provide her will not cover her dependents if she is killed skydiving, which she does as often as she can. I don’t have the numbers, but I’d be willing to bet large sums of money that the number of fatalities per jump per year is exceeded by the number of fatatlities due to one-pack-a-day smoking per smoker per year. I see smoking as much more analagous to skydiving than driving a car. Nobody needs to skydive. Nobody should skydive. I’m not going to tell people not to. But if they go splat, why should I pay? I shouldn’t, and fortunately, I don’t.
Of course not. You, and any other readers, will note that I didn’t single out Twinkies or even junk food. I said eating a lot of fat, which is entirely voluntary, and is only loosely related to eating particular items of food. Someone who buys a pack of Twinkies every couple weeks probably consumes less fat than someone who has a cheese omelet every morning.
There are certainly ways to measure a person’s body fat and cholesterol, and nearly all food is labeled with the amount of fat and cholesterol, among other things. The FDA does have jurisdiction over foods–F is for Food–and they are responsible for those labels.
If we’re trying to discourage dangerous behaviors, some of which are difficult to specify, why not go to a system where we tax the consequences of those behaviors? Have a motorcycle accident, pay a fee. Get cancer, pay a fee. That way, no matter how the undesirable outcome came about, the government, could be certain that it had instituted a tax supporting the enlightened social goal of discouraging that type of behavior.
To some extent, this system exists already, though the penalties are not always in the form of a tax. If you drive a sports car, for instance, you pay higher auto insurance than if you drive a station wagon. If you get in an accident or are charged with a violation in any vehicle, your insurance goes up, and stays up for many years until you can “prove” you are a safe driver again. If you have a pre-existing medical condition, sometimes you can’t get health insurance at all, even if your condition has nothing to do with your behavior.
So it’s sort of amazing to me that some people feel regular smokers (whose behavior virtually guarantees health problems), should be treated like everybody else when they eventually get cancer, emphysema, heart disease, etc. To me that’s like reckless drivers expecting to pay the same auto insurance rate I do (haven’t been in an accident since I was 18).
I have a difficult time thinking of another behavior people engage in on a regular basis that has a more certain damaging impact on health than smoking. I’d say the evidence is far more clear than diet (not so much that some food can be bad, but rather what kinds of food, exactly, and to what extent, are to blame for obesity, type-II diabetes, etc.), or just about anything else. Sure, extreme sports might kill more people per capita, but extreme sports enthusiasts are denied various kinds of coverage if they bite it while participating in that activity.
In summary, we already have a penalty-based system designed to distrubute costs based on risk. Taxes are the penalty smokers pay. I myself would like to see the revenue better allocated, but I don’t see the argument that smokers shouldn’t have to bear the burden of responsibility for their idiocy because “it’s a free country” or whatever. Fine, if it’s a free country, you should feel free to light up all you like, but not raid the public coffers afterward when your lack of foresight leaves you footing the bill for a lung transplant. You wanna kill yourself? Great! Just don’t do it on my dime.