Penn State to charge smokers and others more for health insurance
This is a pretty good metaphor for where the country is heading. Even faculty members who don’t smoke see this for the personal intrusion it really is.
Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Ed reports.
Do You Smoke? Pay $75 a Month
First Pennsylvania State University made employees verify that their children were in fact their own and their marriages were real to continue receiving health care benefits. Next, it announced that employees who didn’t submit to a biometric screening by fall, and annually, would have to pay a $100 monthly insurance surcharge.
So last week, when Penn State announced it was instituting a $75 monthly surcharge for smokers, and an additional $100 surcharge for coverage for spouses and domestic partners eligible for insurance through their own jobs, some faculty took it as proof that their benefits were under attack.
“Let me preface this by saying I don’t smoke and I don’t care for smoking and I’m glad there are regulations against smoking in the work place,” said Lee Samuel Finn, professor physics and astronomy at Penn State’s main campus in University Park.“But what we’re talking about here is reducing someone’s compensation because they smoke, and that’s not a whole lot different than telling someone we’re not going to hire you because we don’t like the way you live your life.”
Matthew Woessner, professor of political science at the Harrisburg campus, said he was equally outraged, and that’s it’s a slippery slope from penalizing someone for smoking to penalizing them for a much more common health problem: being overweight.
“It’s very important that people understand the larger principle involved,” he said. “Once an organization thinks it has the right to regulate legal conduct, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t levy that right to arguably a more serious health problem in America.”
Penn State announces new health insurance surcharges for smokers, others (Inside Higher Ed | News)
Comments
What’s wrong with charging someone more for health insurance if their behavior warrants it?
This has been the case in private insurance for years. And the ivory tower people are shocked by this?
Or, alternatively, why should I pay more for my healthcare to cover the cost of your emphysema?
I thought that Obamacare was trying to deny charging higher premiums for smokers, to hasten the demise of private insurance by making rates skyrocket for non-smokers. Although its also been described as a “glitch”. Take your pick.
Academia of all sorts just don’t understand what it’s like in The Real World. My sister-in-law teaches kindergarten. In the last couple of years she was part of the effort to recall Gov. Snyder because he dared support legislation that would make teachers’ jobs closer to those in the private sector (things like holding them accountable to standards and/or requiring performance reviews).
When I told her I worked at an at-will employer, and that that meant they could fire me basically if they felt like it, she refused to believe that was the case.
Basically, education as a whole is simply mired in an out-of-touch alternate reality, a soap bubble tenaciously and rabidly protected by the rabid unions that exist within it.
Yea, that’s actually a standard practice, even for public employees. I’ve never worked anywhere, public or private sector, that didn’t charge smokers more for their insurance premiums.
Where does it end? Are you overweight? Do you participate in risky sexual practices? How often do you eat red meat? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Currently? It ends at smoking.
Really, this isn’t a new thing at all. Car insurance does this all the time. The amount you pay is based on various risk factors.
Why shouldn’t someone who is more likely to cost the insurance company more money have to pay more into the pool?
Again, this is completely standard practice and has been for a very long time. It’s only the liberals that seem to think that everyone should pay the same amount for insurance and that your behavior shouldn’t affect the amount you pay.
Even faculty members who don’t smoke see this for the personal intrusion it really is.
As long as one isn’t forced to have health insurance, this isn’t a problem. It makes sense for insurance providers to discriminate on the basis of risky behavior. The problem isn’t their policy but the individual mandate in Obamacare.