Quote Originally Posted by pll View Post
It is an interesting issue to try to consider some health indicator when setting the insurance rates. The tricky question is which one (or which ones... perhaps it should be a composite score). Given any indicator, there will be people that get hurt by it.
Frankly, I think that we should have national health insurance, paid through our taxes, but that isn't a popular position these days.

Given that it is so hard to maintain weight loss, the number of factors that go into weight gain, including genetic factors, my opinion is that a punitive charge is not going to help.

Here is an interesting article on the issue of charging people different rates, depending on whether they are obese, or smokers, or the like: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/17/he...pagewanted=all