re: Rep. Mo Brooks: People who live 'good lives' should pay less for health insurance

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If you eat fried food, fast food, pie and drink soda should you pay more for your insurance because you are a higher risk?

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What about those with type 1 diabetes? No life style choices there. You just had bad luck. Do you still pay more?

my company offers health insurance.

the employee paid portion is set based on what plan you sign up for and what dependents you have

they just instituted two "wellness plan items"

1) employee take a physical every year. paid 100% by the insurance. if employee doesn't take the physical then they pay $40 more a week out of pocket for their health insurance

2) if an employee uses tobacco they either sign up for a tobacco cessation program (paid by company) or pay $40/week more out of pocket. (dont have to quit, but have to do program)

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If you wreck more cars is your auto insurance higher?

If you eat fried food, fast food, pie and drink soda should you pay more for your insurance because you are a higher risk?

No one complains that life insurance is more costly for those with bad lifestyle choices.

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Few complain that under the ACA you are penalized for being a smoker. Or that insurers reward people that do their due diligence and schedule and attend preventive screenings that over the long run save insurers money when adhered too.

The problem is healthcare is not 1:1 based on personal responsibility. To treat it as such would be a mis-diagnosis.

How does non-preventable anemia fall into your personal responsibility narrative? Or hereditary issues like Hyperoxaluria that leads to high kidney stone production throughout your life?

Health care is not the place you can apply bootstraps logic to all the problems. In areas where it is feasible to to do so, like smoking, the system does. It is just going to be a problem to ever fully optimize it because so much is interconnected and not able to be definitively determined. Like how do you deal with alcoholism? Is that personal responsibility? The common teaching for nearly a century says yes. More recent research suggests it is likely much less so. Or the opiod crisis? May of these people got to where they are because of drug companies and legitimate channels of medicine.

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f you wreck more cars is your auto insurance higher?

If you eat fried food, fast food, pie and drink soda should you pay more for your insurance because you are a higher risk?

No one complains that life insurance is more costly for those with bad lifestyle choices.

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In a free market I agree; however, the insurance industry has more regulations than Kim Jong Un's biographer.

For the record- I fully support the deregulation of the insurance marketplace. Free enterprise is a glorious thing ... on those rare occasions where we actually let it happen.