This is the guts of the discussion. Who you are and how you chose to live has a direct bearing upon your state of health and therefore your health cover. It all needs to be dragged out in the open. Smokers know they are at a disadvantage when it comes to where they smoke, what they pay and the knock-on effects from smoking such as health insurance. Obese people is just another obvious group that once hardly existed and now accounts for a huge chunk of the population and threatens to sink the ship. As with smokers, by taking a tougher line with fat people you just might be helping them whether they can see it or not. What is wrong with taxing fast foods for example.
You know what the bigger bullshit out this story is? The fact that he couldn't just go an buy the organ from a willing seller. Why should a private or public panel be able to play God and decide who should get organs and who shouldn't and whether or not we have the right to sell what belongs to us - our organs? Singapore recently allowed a market in kidneys to prevent unnecessary deaths. The key to reform is to not constrain supply and stifle choice and competition. This bill goes exactly in the opposite direction.
What you're missing is that virtually everybody engages in activity that increases their health care cost expectancy above "optimal" levels. Virtually everybody. Nothing. But then you'll also tax cell phones to recover brain cancer costs and snowboards to recover broken-limb costs and cars to recover etc etc etc... It's a big pandora's box of "who gets to decide?"
Actually, smokers aren't costly. Smokers tend to die quickly once they become sick and aren't very costly to treat. Obesity causes a lot of chronic illnesses patients live with for decades. All of this stuff is already taken into account by health insurance companies when they set your premium. So, people are already docked and rewarded for their choices based on what it costs to insure those people. Now, what we need is national competition among insurance companies to break state monopolies and oligopolies. Why shouldn't insurance companies be forced to compete for our patronage?
Personally, I'm all for it, including the modern miracles of chemistry that soft drinks are. It would also incentivize the producers and fast food outfits to focus on healthier offerings. Any such tax increases should focus on tobacco, junk and booze, provided that "junk food" is properly and legitimately identified by some predefined criteria. Mind, you, that's just my opinion.
Yeah, that's definitely a door you want to open, where the poor will essentially become organ pods for the rich. Third World, anyone?
I don't think so, it is all a matter of the lost art of common sense. You identify the major groups of negative and growing social behavior and deal with them individually. By negative I mean both to the individual and the community at large.
Sosueme, You're assuming a lot of things. First of all, you're assuming that demand for junk food is highly elastic - that for every unit increase in price there will be an equal unit decrease in demand. That's not the case. So, what you'll have is people spending more on food and then you'll have a dead-weight economic loss from additional taxes. If people really want junk food but don't want to pay the tax, they'll just make it at home out of perfectly reasonable ingredients. Plus, it's not the junk food per se - it's how much people are eating, period. The second thing you're assuming is that the added taxes will do anything other than expand the reach of government.
Except that if you're a so-called "insurer," then your function is to take in premiums and dream up reasons not to pay claims. Imagine the creative free-for-all arising from coming up with every conceivable reason that you should not have done what you did and are therefore responsible, either directly or indirectly, for your current "pre-existing condition" or some such. And if you should choose to litigate against the insurer, then you can be sure of one thing: they have more time and money than you do. And with no reform, it shall so remain.