Seen at Business Insurance:
Obese workers file twice the number of workers compensation claims and have medical costs that are seven times higher than their nonobese counterparts, according to a Duke University Medical School study.
This article caught my eye while the question/issue of universal health care was floating around in the back of my mind.
I’ve written many times here that a big concern I have with the concept of government-funded health insurance programs is that it gives the bureaucrats too great an incentive to meddle in individuals’ daily lives, under the premise of needing to control costs.
Can you imagine the fast food taxes or bans that would almost certainly be being proposed in state legislatures around the country right now, due to this study and others like it? I can almost hear the bureaucrats saying now, “we have to ban them, or else the government will go bankrupt sooner.”