"Want medical coverage? That will be $25, fatso."

Yeah. Because our health system has been overtaxed by people choosing to engage in stupid behaviors such as choosing to have blonde hair and blue eyes.

I don't think insurance companies should be the arbiter of this, but under our current whacked insurance system, they are the only ones who can be.

Regardless of our insurance system being so inefficient and adding costs, health care costs HAVE skyrocketed much more because Americans are so unhealthy. Obesity over the last 30 years has become an epidemic. As a result, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and certain types of cancer are way more prevalent than ever. When we have what the NIH describes as a type two diabetes epidemic on our hands, it tells you we have one fucking stupid population. It's like lemmings marching into the sea. And advances in health care just enable people to be stupid.

The great thing is that people can be absolute morons and smoke and eat fatty, crappy foods that make them fat as all hell, because over the last few decades we have developed all kinds of pills and medical technologies to keep people alive longer--despite the fact that people are giving themselves heart disease and diabetes and emphysema and numerous other serious diseases. The bad news is that those pills and technologies are as expensive as all hell and it's the reason health care now gobbles up a ridiculously huge percentage of our GDP and we don't have the resources to give everything to everyone.

We'd still have a problem with costs, even if Americans were healthier, but we have a problem to the tune of billions of dollars more because of smokers and obese people who make no effort to be healthy. Comparing wanting them to shoulder the cost of their unhealthy behavior to "blonde hair and blue eyed people"--as if there is even a reasoned analogy--is just way off the mark.

Our insurance system is whacked, but what I typed above is just plain truth. If you are a smoker and you never exercise and you don't eat a healthy diet, you drink too much, etc., you forfeit the right to bitch about our health care problems. You're the problem.

 

Perhaps so. And maybe insurance companies shouldn't be the arbiters of this. But focusing on the relatively few people who can't control their weight, ignores the masses (no pun intended) who have made America way fatter and unhealthier than it was 50 years ago. There are a lot of factors contributing to how expensive health care has become. Our behavior is by far the most significant.