Health Tax - a proposalFollow

I think you should have to spend a year dealing with health care in the U.S. Then see if you have any room to complain.

I had to pay outrageous amounts for my auto insurance (even just the basic, save your *** from being sued, coverage) ever since I first started driving at 16. Even though I've never had any tickets, even parking, and have never been involved in an accident.

All because my family had extremely poor credit when I was young.

Life sucks, get over it. The safe pay a lot just so that the unsafe can actually afford the coverage. Same thing is applying to the health care taxes in your case.

(Good news is I turned 25 last year, so prices did drop about 100 dollars a year)

If you have any pre-existing medical condition at all in the US, you can't get insurance unless it's through an employer.

Which is stupid, because insurance companies try to claim your sinus infection counts as a pre-existing condition.

Basically, if you ever went to the doctor for anything in your life, the US insurers will deny you coverage, unless its from an employee plan.

Type-I Diabetes (along with thousands of genetic disorders) would like to disagree with you.

But what about the 98 year old man that eats bacon fried in pork fat for breakfast everyday, and is as healthy as can be.

And the fiber downing, soy eating, 25 year old marathon jogger who ends up having a genetic disease which costs thousands in tax dollars to take care of.

Live with it.

It is a social cost.

Your 25 year old marathon jogger is selecting an extreme example. They are outnumbered tens to hundreds of times over by the overweight, unfit generations of children coming through the school system. Let alone the 30 somethings already out there.

You can pick select examples to support your argument but the overall picture betrays your point of view.

My original point still stands here. Suffer the American health care system for one year and you'll never complain again. Honestly, I think you're taking for granted how good you have it over there.

Then you pay a moderate tax. That is unless you are smoking, drinking like a fish and performing no exercise at all.

Genetic disorders have nothing to do with personal responsibility and are not the subject of my rant! I have no issue at all with paying for socially responsible health care. I just object to paying for the irresponsible.

Woah there, don't throw eugenics out of the window yet.

So I wonder if there is a middle way?

I'm sure there is, but I haven't give it much thought. Honestly, I'm a fat smoker who drinks, and I pay about 15% of my income to insurance I never even use for myself - 95% of claims on my insurance account are for medical services for my sister, for health issues that are entirely outside of her control. If the U.S. ever institutes a government health care system similar to that of the U.K., then I'll have far more interest in figuring out how I can prevent paying taxes for all the other fatties in the neighborhood, too.

That's the problem. Cigarettes and alcohol are heavily taxed because they are a an unhealthy choice, and thus, an easily taxed item (less resistance from the general public). Taxing unhealthy food would face far more resistance, and how do you decide at which point something is unhealthy enough to be taxed? What you eventually end up with is a totalitarian system where everybody eats broccoli and apples because everything else has been deemed unfit for consumption and is therefore heavily taxed and inaccessible to the masses (yeah, that's an extreme, but I'm making a point here).



Cigarette tax revenue is substantial. I don't have exact numbers, but I do know that it often funds multiple programs. An article on Maryland's cigarette tax reports that "in FY 2007, Maryland's $1 cigarette tax brought in $269.1 million in revenue." It's not exactly chump change.

Edited, Jan 29th 2009 8:49pm by BrownDuck

Yeah, sorry about this wall of text, and obviously I started it and didn't finish it while a lot of you made further posts in the mean time.

Australia also has "Sin" taxes. I think it's roughly 4/5ths of the price of a pack of cigarettes is tax that goes into General Revenue now. Government health care is paid out of General Revenue. There is a controversy because wine has a much lower tax (read "Sin" tax) on it than beer and spirits. The beer and spirit sin tax is, I think, about 3/4 of the price of a bottle/can.

The GST (Goods and Services Tax) of a blanket 10% acts as a reverse-sin tax on fresh fruit and vegetables because they are exempt from it, as are, I think, many basic unprocessed food items like grains and meat. They are the only exempt items from the GST.

We have spent our entire history with a gradually improving life-span, which started growing faster in the late 19th century and accelerated in the 20th. Now we have the first generation of children who will live shorter lives than their parents.

But it's not as simple as "good" and "bad" people. Our bodies evolved in times of scarcity. Simple carbs and fats were so rare AND nutritionally valuable to aquire that as an Adaptive trait our bodies are set up to be addicted to them. It's a biological science that's only begun to be looked at and understood.

Inclusive in the "rare and valuable" trait is that your body will tell you that you are full after eating a set amount of protein, but it won't tell you that you are full no matter how much simple carbs you've eaten. It's why you can't eat another bite of dinner, but can suddenly eat an entire dessert on top of that.

Why do you think that people will keep stuffing their faces when they know it's not good for them, and they actually would desperately rather be thinner? Depending on your individual physiology there's a whole lot of "happy drug" events going on in your brain, that you're dependent upon. You go into agonies of withdrawal if you don't get your happy food. It's just not as obvious as a heroin addiction because junk and fast food is cheaper to aquire, available almost everywhere at any time of day and night, has not the same social stigma and no legal problems.

Junk food withdrawals won't kill you, but depending on physiology they can include debilitating, even dangerously heavy depression or dysphoria, and migraine headaches. The depression or dysphoria range from being mildly unpleasant for yourself and others, all the way up to making you a danger to yourself and others. It's not an excuse for bad behaviour, but it's a reason for it, and a real problem for the person going through the emotional rollercoaster, who think that their emotional reactions to events are sane and reasonable, and that therefor what those emotions prompt them to do are justified becuase they are in the right. People who aren't looking out for simple internal plunges of chemicals that make them hypersensitive and over-reactive.

It was about 60 years ago that for the first time in the entirety of history the majority of the Western population had access to such food in such quantities. In fact, highly processed food with hydrocarbon-derived additives are a complete biological novelty.

It's going to take a long time for society to adjust to the access, and decide how to handle it. It's not just individuals that have to take responsibility. How can individuals make the right choices if they are undereducated in the harm something does. Undereducated in the processes and signs of of addiction. Undereducated in skills to get off and stay off a heavily addictive substances. Undereducated in skills to find emotional balance and a feeling of "allright"ness via other means instead of via the addiction you didn't know you had.

How can people make the right choices if they presume that legality means safety and rightness? There are 6000 food additives in Australia and 4000 food additives in the USA that are banned from human consumption in the EU as being toxic, poisonous or carcinogenic.


Nutritional and medical scientists want junk and fast food and pop/coke/soda/ soft-drink advertising banned in Australia until after 9:30 pm. They'd ask for a total ban if they could get it. They want the food and drinks themselves outlawed in school canteens. They want large sin taxes put on junk, fast, and hyper-processed/high sugar food and drinks.

Other people are utterly shocked and bewildered that such ideas could be even suggested. WTF is wrong with food and snacks and the drinks that they drink all day every day? Why do you want me to suddenly pay twice as much for my food and my kid's food? How shocking cruel and insensitive and classist that is. Most people couldn't afford it. What the hell is wrong with you that you are asking for a ban on advertising snacks and food that is aimed at kids during children's TV programmes? What else is the point? You can't put companies out of business, that isn't fair. You think my kids are going to eat a salad sandwich and an apple for lunch with a bottle of water? Oh ha ha. Think again. I'd like to watch you try.

60 years ago our parents had new foods presented to them, and they duly tried them and shared them with their kids. Everyone was enthusiastic about them. Noone told them they were dangerous. There were a few lone dissenting voices ignored in the wilderness, dismissed as as lunatic hippies and communists who wanted to bring down corporations and the economy and were the enemies of normal people and their jobs. Now we have data about the results of eating them. And now we're puzzling out as a society what to do. Food pervades everything that happens. Massive industries are based on them.

I'm in favour of a staged banning over time of substances that nutritionists prove are harmful. But after it was completed, you wouldn't recognise most supermarkets and resteraunts and your cupboard and fridge at home.

Are you ready for that? Are you ready to sacrifice 4/5ths of your supermarket products, resteraunt meals, fridge and cupboard contents in exchange for different processed foods, higher prices on your resteraunt meals, possibly more home-cooking? In exchange for better health and less pain during your lifetime, and a longer time that you remain fit, active, healthy, and able to work or enjoy retirement? In exchange for less depression, and less depression-based violence?

There'll be masses of jobs lost and jobs gained in the turnover. Current business will fold, new businesses will spring up.

And I haven't even gotten to the activity part of the equation. Business thirst for productivity gains have enforced more sedentary work and home life-styles on most of us. Female emancipation, which I still support, has enforced a need for more labour saving devices to keep house while women are out earning their own pay and following their own vocations.

There's been an explosion of homework requirements in the last few decades, tiring kids out more who are already tired from their nutritionally compromised, even slowly toxic food. Homework, of course, usually being a sedentry activity. And bone deep tiredness making a computer game or TV far more immediately attractive than running and jumping around, which would help things in the long run.

I'm not saying that adult individuals don't have a responsibility to hunt down their own and their kid's problems, and do something about them on an individual and community basis. They have a responsibility to make themselves aware of problematic issues so that they can vote in governments that make the right policies. I'm just saying it's not quite so simple as "They did it all to themselves."

Would you find it interesting that my private health insurance will pay $100 a year for a pair of sports shoes, and will subsidise certain gym or yoga type classes?

Edited, Jan 30th 2009 2:20am by Aripyanfar