Hey, Fatass, Drop and Give Me Your Vacation Time

From the the LATimes via Slate: Companies are fining their employees for being overweight.

Looking for new ways to trim the fat and boost workers' health, some employers are starting to make overweight employees pay if they don't slim down.

Others, citing growing medical costs tied to obesity, are offering fit workers lucrative incentives that shave thousands of dollars a year off healthcare premiums.

In one of the boldest moves yet, an Indiana-based hospital chain last month said it decided on the stick rather than the carrot. Starting in 2009, Clarian Health Partners will charge employees as much as $30 every two weeks unless they meet weight, cholesterol and blood-pressure guidelines that the company deems healthy.

Before y'all start chomping at the Cheetos to defend the embattled chunkster employees, remember, the way we currently do health care in this country is through your job.

UnitedHealthcare, a nationwide insurer, introduced a plan this month that, for a typical family, includes a $5,000 yearly deductible that can be reduced to $1,000 if an employee isn't obese and doesn't smoke.

Last summer, a similar plan was offered to county workers in Benton County, Ark. The $2,500-a-year deductible can be reduced to $500 if a worker meets low height-to-weight ratios during yearly on-site physicals.

If workplace insurers are willing to charge such different deductibles for obese smokers and normal-weight non-smokers, it makes total sense for the employer to pass those costs onto the employee for a couple reasons. By putting the cost of the unhealthy behavior on the person making the health-related decisions, we encourage them to reduce the expensive behavior (any fellow Carsty vets remember the ship captain tying his boat down?). Moreover, from the insurer's perspective, more information about the character of the risks in their pool will allow them to price the insurance more accurately.

We're the exception to the rule in the US providing health insurance largely through the employer, and there are lots of reasons why that's become the most efficient solution. But lumping a whole group of employees together as a health insurance unit is a little awkward: It'd be easier to buy insurance, say, for all 30-35 year-old women who don't smoke and weigh between 150 and 155 lbs. Their risk will be by and large the same. Since that isn't the case in a group of employees, the JP is down with allowing the employer to pass on some of the costs generated by societally-expensive unhealthy behavior to the employees taking part.

Even though Courtney Jackson, 28, and I agree on this conclusion, her reasoning indicates that she's probably a real dumbass:

"At first, I was mad when I thought I would be charged $30 for being overweight," said Courtney Jackson, 28, a customer service representative at Clarian. "But when I found out it was going to be broken into segments — like just $10 for being overweight — it sounded better."