Rights and reason up in smoke, part 3
In parts 1 and 2 of this series, I tried to show you just how much of a political battleground the cigarette smoking issue is shaping up to be. Everywhere you look, municipalities and law enforcement agencies are becoming ever more smoke-hostile in the Land of the Free.
Employers are, too. And despite what the mouthpieces for the smoke-Nazis say, it isn’t about your health. Their measures aren’t “for your own good” at all – it’s about saving a few bucks on benefits.
According to the AP story I used as source material for the last Daily Dose – in which I told you about a man being fired from his outdoor lawn-care job for smoking in his OFF HOURS – the Scotts Company (a subsidiary of Scotts/ Miracle-Gro) feels justified in maintaining a strict anti-smoking policy among its employees NOT because it’s an impediment to their job performance or bad for their corporate image
But because employer-paid group health insurance coverage is made marginally more expensive if some within that employee group are smokers. Once again, this is a very slippery slope – on a whole lot of levels. First off, the “science” that insurance companies use to calculate smoking-related risk is fundamentally flawed
That’s not the real issue here, though. Even if the actuaries were dead-on accurate, the idea that minor variations in the cost of an employee’s benefits – which the law doesn’t even require employers to offer, mind you – should factor so heavily into hiring policies portends of very bad things for America.
Think about it: What if the pointy-heads determine that dog owners get injured more often in the course of walking or playing with their dogs than non-pet owners? Should employers be able to discriminate against dog-lovers? What if it’s determined that parents of small children cost more to insure because they get sick more often from their kids (this is most certainly the case – I’d bet it’s a bigger cost to insurance companies than smoking)? Does that mean companies should be able to hire only single employees?
Do you see where all this is going? It’s tyranny of the actuaries!
Bottom line: Taken to its logical end, private companies may soon be able to legally deny jobs to all but the slimmest, youngest, and healthiest people whose personal lives are sterile of all risk or vice (as defined by a bunch of pointy-headed “company men”). And all to save a few bucks on insurance coverage that ISN’T required by law, and that wasn’t even a component of the vast majority of jobs just 20 or 30 years ago! The bean counters are running the asylum.
And what’s worse, the majority of Americans seem to AGREE with them.
According to a recent survey of 1,500 people, approximately 60% of Americans feel that smokers should pay more for their health insurance than non-smokers – and 30% feel that heftier folks should shell out more for their coverage than their more svelte counterparts
I read these brief findings on an opinion website. Information on the study is scarce, though I tried to find out some more specifics. But if these findings are anywhere near true, it means only one thing:
That as a people, we’re being indoctrinated to consider only the dollars and cents of things, not their bigger significance with regard to our basic freedom and privacy. It also reveals a disturbing shift toward a feeling of entitlement to things like insurance and medical treatment – things we increasingly look to our employers and the government to provide.
This is just plain un-American. There was a time not all that long ago when Americans wouldn’t have trusted the Feds to dictate our medical options to us
We wouldn’t have relied upon our bosses to pay for our medical treatment
And we wouldn’t have involved ourselves with insurance companies in any way at all – because we know that, like a casino, they are only in it for the money
That was a better place, a place of freedom, purer capitalism, and truer individuality. I wonder if we’ll ever get back to that place.
The core group behind the anti-smoking hysteria was the Puritans in the environmentalist movement. They were the “useful idiots” (Lenin’s term) that destroyed the nuclear power industry in the U.S. and caused tens of millions of deaths from malaria by banning DDT. H.L. Mencken, the greatest philosopher and literary critic of the 20th Century, said: “Show me a Puritan and I will show you a son-of-a-bitch.”
