Fair-Sharing the Costs
The Air Force has figured out that smoking costs them $107 million a year in medical attention and time lost due to illness. That’s a lot of money, unless of course you’ve got the government writing you a virtual blank check every year. I would think that they are costing us too much. The smokers should have to pick up the $107 million, quit smoking, or get off the government payroll. Smoking is self-destructive; we should not tolerate wherever possible. Which means prohibiting the hiring of smokers, and the requirement that workers who smoke pay a premium both in contributions to insurance programs, and salary mitigation for time lost to excessive ill health.
And while we’re beating that drum, let’s apply other health care standards to the behavior of all government employees, be they bus drivers, dentists, or press spokesmen. Get healthy and stay healthy. If you don’t do what you can for yourself, we’re not going to support your vices or indulge your less than stellar job performance due to conditions under your control. That means people need to be within a normal weight range, brush their teeth, and eat a balanced diet.
Okay, okay...let’s take a giant step forward. Let’s say that everyone who receives health and/or life insurance has to pay extra if they are going to cost more, either in health care, early retirement, and early death benefits paid. It’s only fair. Just look around at your co-workers. The smokers, the couch potatoes, the heavy drinkers, the just plain heavy — they all need to take better care of themselves, because you — the healthy, vibrant, fit ones — are paying out of your own pockets the higher costs of the slovenly. You are supporting them in their bad habits.
Now the final measure. Let’s say that no one is relishing the opportunity to say to the "sinners" that they need to get their act together. Cool, here’s the solution. Stop paying for people’s health and/or life insurance or pension funds. Instead, the companies can give the equivalent of their contribution in cash directly to the employees. This would then shift the responsibility of choosing the best coverage to each individual employee. Let them hear it from the people who are actually betting on their health. Let your friendly Allstate Agent say that he won’t be in good hands until you cut down on the nightly sixpack-skis and you drop 50 pounds.
This isn’t a rant about slugs and slobs, rather it is a call to commitment. A solicitation for people to shed the cloak of victimhood and start doing what they can, reasonably, to make themselves better citizens. That means taking less and giving more where possible. Requiring less public assistance. Demonstrating greater participation.
Douglas Adams in one of his insightful fancies suggested that we were all just one big laboratory experiment being conducted by white mice. I suggest that the purpose of the experiment is to see what conditions would be required for homo sapiens to get sapient enough to work together to resolve our temporal problems so that we might move on to bigger and better. Human beings are extraordinary creatures. We shouldn’t waste them.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.