May Soon Be Influenced By Healthy Lifestyle Decisions
Costs associated with finding and purchasing
Individual health insurance may someday be based on your diet, your exercise habits, and whether or not you are a smoker. In the struggle to make health coverage more affordable, some legislators and health insurance agencies alike could be turning to our personal decision making skills as a means of judging how much we should pay for insurance.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has already suggested a plan that appeared to be the most controversial; he suggests that those people who make healthy diet, exercise, and other lifestyle decisions should get to pay less for their individual health insurance coverage than those who do not.
And the health insurance agencies themselves have been very supportive of higher taxes on cigarettes, soda, junk foods, and other products that have been linked to rising healthcare costs.
How exactly are these factors involved in our national healthcare costs? Mainly, the issue is that America's unhealthy lifestyle decisions are costing us all, even those people who choose
not to participate in such behaviors.
For example, according to a study from health research economists at the University of California, the total cost of caring for Americans with health problems that have been caused by smoking is more than $72.2 billion dollars each year.
And even worse, another study by researchers at RTI International and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that medical expenditures for obese individuals is about $75 billion.
So, that's $147.2 billion dollars we pay each year for having bad habits. And as that cost is shifted down to small businesses and consumers, it becomes a major reasons why our healthcare costs have gone through the roof, and individual health insurance rates, among all other kinds of insurance, is now too expensive for almost 50 million Americans.
Oponents of these plans feel that it isn't the government's job to monitor our personal activities, and that doing so will create discrimination against people who are overweight or who smoke. Others say that the addictive nature of cigarettes and, as some say, food, doesn't make a healthy lifestyle such an easy choice for everyone.
Facts on:
Individual Health Insurance
Did you know...
The total cost of caring for people with health problems caused by smoking is around $72.2 billion dollars a year?
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But as this country struggles to find some solution for the rising costs of healthcare and insurance, every American will be paying too much, and not enough of us can rest assured that we and our loved ones will be protected in the event of a medical emergency.
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