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Tax the fat

Discussion in 'Serious' started by Mary Jo, 13 Jun 2006.

  1. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    If you only eat junk food 2/3 times a year, I'm sure you can stomach the price hike (pardon the pun)...
     
  2. Glider

    Glider /dev/null

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    Yeah, like Nexxo said... if you eat it 3-4times a year, then you won't notice it, but if you eat it dayly (or more), then you contribute a lot more...
     
  3. specofdust

    specofdust Banned

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    There is a principle at stake there though Nexxo. Why should thin people have to pay for a tax that helps out fat people, because the fat peolpe who pay that tax are too stupid to not eat at macdonalds every single day?

    I'm not sure that the majority should have to pay because the minority take things to excess.
     
  4. Da_BaCoN

    Da_BaCoN Minimodder

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    But wait - are the "majority" (or "thin" people) already paying via the health policies and all?
     
  5. Cthippo

    Cthippo Can't mod my way out of a paper bag

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    The majority of people will never need to call the fire brigade or an ambulance, should they have to pay for that? The majority of people will never drive the road to (insert place here), should only the users have to pay for that road?

    The purpose of government is to do fo individuals the things they cannot do individually, and these things are paid for collectively. National defense, infrasrtucture, emergency services, Health care in the UK (you lucky ****s), are all examples of things that the people pay the government to do for them because it is not feasdible or economical for them to do for themselves. Of course there is going to be waste, fraud, and abuse, that is the going to happen in any human endeavour. Just because some people take advantage of the system doesn't mean we shouldn't have a system or that others shouldn't contribute to the system.

    If you think private health insurance as the primary means of funding health care is a good idea, I invite you to come see how well it works in the US. You know what it costs to have your appendix removed here? Try $15,000 on average. What it costs to "see" the doctor (usually 5 minutes after an hour's wait if you're lucky)? Try $60-100. Lets say you slip with your dremel and rip your hand open and need an ambulance. You're going to be out $600-$1000 before you ever get to the hospital. So what about insurance? Well, for private health insurance you're looking at a bare minimum of $200 every month, and if you ever use it, they drop you like a hot rock. The number one cause of bankruptcy in America is medical expenses. Many many working famalies have ended up on the street because someone got sick and couldn't work.

    There are certainly people who abuse what few public healthcare resources we have in this country, but they are not the majority. The majority are people who work for a living and cannot afford insurance and are one accident or illness away from losing everything they have. Fewer and fewer businesses offer health insurance to their employees anymore, and the ones that do expect the employee to cover part of the cost. On average it costs a business $600 per employee every month to offer basic medical coverage.

    The only people who benefit from privitazed insurance are the insurers and health care companies. The public gets screwed, the doctors get screwed, the patients get doubly screwed and the health care companies are some of the most profitable in the country.

    Your NHS and the Canadian system both have problems, but let me tell you they are a damn sight better than they "system" we have in the US. I know it may be hard to see from where you're standing, but be glad for what you have.
     
  6. Glider

    Glider /dev/null

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    Solidarity...
     
  7. webbyman

    webbyman Hax.

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    Amazing idea, however the main problem is sort how fat the person is....

    Im starting to weight more and have moved from bmi in 'underweight' to 'acceptable' this is caused by going to the gym and working out...

    so larger people participating in weights who may not be fat just 'big' will still be taxed? dispite the fact theres little they can do about it, and they are infact healthy...
     
  8. yodasarmpit

    yodasarmpit Modder

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    Post of the week. :thumb:
     
  9. Lord_A

    Lord_A Boom baby!

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    What specofdust said tbh

    And I agree with most of what you said Cthippo but collectively or not, I don't agree with taxing fast food / fatty food. If we start doing that, then as I said before - where will it end? After all eating/drinking *anything* too much is unhealthy, so by that logic we should tax everything more just for the individuals who choose to eat/drink a lot of (insert choice here).

    I'm not sure if this 'fat tax' is also related to something else which has come in the news lately - taxing Coca-Cola / Pepsi / fizzy drinks. Now that will affect me as I drink on average 2 litres of Coke a day - why should I pay more just because one day I may actually have to use the health service - I haven't used it for anything else yet, and lets say I only use it because of Coke, then why should I pay twice? If you get me...difficult to explain tbh. I'm just against the whole idea of taxing different foods/drinks more than others. I don't even think that alcohol & tobacco should be taxed as heavily as they are in the UK - controversial as that may be.

    At the end of the day it's all down to money, government want it. They don't really give a crap if people are fat / smoke / whatever - they love it since they can tax it. If governments were really that concerned they would have enforced laws on companies / manufacturers to actually make a difference, example:

    a). Enforce strict guidlines on sugar / salt / etc. levels in fast food
    b). Ban the use of known unhealthier cooking oils when there are better alternatives
    c). Do more to promote healthy living
    d). Do not allow 10 million McDonalds/whatever stores in 1 city so that there is one in almost every city centre corner

    The list could be almost endless, but there are a lot of practical steps which can be taken before silly ideas like fat tax are put in place - IMO
     
  10. Lord_A

    Lord_A Boom baby!

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    You cannot compare services such as fire brigades & ambulances to fat tax. People don't choose to crash & call the ambulance service, neither do buildings catch on fire because they choose too. Road infastructure, although not used directly by some people, does contribute in the daily lives of everyone - that is obvious.

    EDIT: if the whole issue is about fat people / smokers / etc costing the NHS more money than 'normal' people then surely the fairer solution would be to charge people for the type of services they use within the NHS and for what reason they ended up there in the first place. That way, someone who is as big a cow because he/she chose to eat 10 big macs every day pays for their heart op instead of it being covered by the taxpayers. Whilst I still don't agree even with that sort of system, I'd be more in favour of that than a blanket tax on 'fat foods'
     
  11. heelan

    heelan bow tie enthusiast

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    Surely the deal with any other kind of insurance is that you take "reasonable care" of whatever's being insured in return for protection should it get broken/stolen/whatever. So you should lock your house and maybe even get a burglar alarm, but you don't need to put bars across the windows or have twenty locks on your door.

    The same should apply to health. You can't cut out any activity that would potentially give you cancer, because you'd never go outside or eat anything or use plastic containters or whatever else is supposed to give you cancer. You can't help being genetically prone to certain conditions. But you can avoid eating and drinking too much, smoking or just generally being reckless with your health and your life. Those who do not take due care should, theoretically, have the higher "premiums".

    How to apply that in practice is another matter. I'd like to see overweight people and smokers being charged more for their heart bypass/lung transplant/liver transplant operations. It seems fair to me, and the threat of having to pay extra is probably the strongest motivator to live more healthily, much stronger than any public health campaign. However, obesity and smoking are strongly correlated with poverty. It's the poorest people in the country who are most likely to live unhealthily and experience health problems as a result - the ones least able to pay any extra charges are those most likely to incur them. Perhaps tackling poverty is the best route to a healthier population?
     
  12. yodasarmpit

    yodasarmpit Modder

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    Clearly this approach has been ineffective, just look at the numbers still smoking, the highest taxed group of individuals in the country.
     
  13. Lord_A

    Lord_A Boom baby!

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    What she meant (please correct me if I misunderstood heelan), is that people who choose to smoke/drink/eat lots of fast food etc. should be billed at the end of their operation, this should be far more effective than over taxing said product in the first place.

    The fact that people still smoke & drink is proof enough that a fat tax will do nothing at all to stop the queues in McDonalds at lunchtimes.
     
  14. J-Pepper

    J-Pepper Minimodder

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    Why don't we just tax MacDonalds? Heavily...

    If they provide a true healthy alternative, they get tax breaks.

    If they want to maximise their profits, they are going to have to put some of their costs onto the burgers.

    But that in turn may put off some people.

    So they will probably have to do the unthinkable and provide an actual heathy alternative.

    Makes sense to me
     
  15. SparkuS

    SparkuS What's a Dremel?

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    Certainly, in Scotland, I've noticed an encouraging decease in smokers, admittedly its hard to gauge when they're all outside these days, but from the smokers I do know, the smoking ban has largely been the excuse to give up that they've been toying with for years.

    Scotland has a ridiculous obesity problem, and frankly the people concerned dont typically understand anything other than the language of money. Healthy eating is hardly a topic thrashed out in a Partick Pub.

    Tax the Fat I say, before your city turns out like Glasgow.
     
  16. ElThomsono

    ElThomsono Multimodder

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    Just looked out the window, out of the 30 odd people I saw only one of them was obese.

    I say you should let people live like they want to, and if it's costing too much charge for self inflicted injuries on the NHS. I still want to be able to buy cheap burgers from McDonalds :grr:
     
  17. specofdust

    specofdust Banned

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    That's the thing though heelan, the smokers already do pay more for their heart bypass/lung transplant/liver transplant or whatever else we're going to attribute to smoking. They pay something around the 7-9 times more mark then those diseases will ever cost them. Whether that money gets to the NHS is a government issue, but taxing them more won't help anything.

    Fatty foods don't have high tax on them though.

    I think maybe the fairest solution for the non-fatties would be either a yearly levy on anyone over a specific BMI(maybe put something in there that muscley people can get a fat percentage test from doctors to get out of it), or force people over said BMI to pay supplementary costs to the NHS when they use it, top up fees if you will.

    Smoking always causes harm, and there are such a slim minority of people who smoke but are not addicted, or who smoke on a very irregular basis, that a flat tax on cigs basicly works. But there are a huge number of thin or healthy people who eat fatty foods on an irregular basis, so punishing them doesn't seem fair.

    Maybe we should just encourage more social stigma around being fat? In the last 2-3 year smokers have gone from being just humans who inhale tobacco to being the devil re-incarnate(s). Maybe we should just make being fat a far more embarressing thing. Maybe not.

    It's clear there'll be no happy solution here, but I think one probably has to be arrived at, considering in the UK we're rapidly heading towards the 50% obese mark.
     
  18. heelan

    heelan bow tie enthusiast

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    Yes, the threat of a hefty medical bill in the event of getting ill is potentially a much bigger deterrent than a few pence on a pack of ciggies or a government health campaign that tells them they ought not to be smoking.

    Source? And I disagree that more tax would not help anything - there is a point at which the tax on cigarettes would be so high that most would quit. If that is 100 times the cost of a lung transplant then so be it.

    Still doesn't get round the fact that those most likely to be liable for such extra charges are likely to be the poor. What if they can't pay? Do we just let them die? It would also be a nightmare to administer - and potentially cost as much as obesity is costing us now!
     
  19. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    Before this discussion goes any further, I suggest people look at the Health Belief Model. This model attempts to explain some of the belief and motivational factors involved in people engaging in behaviours to stay healthy or get better.

    This model is based on the understanding that a person will take a health-related action (in this case, avoid obesity) if that person:

    1. feels that the negative health condition (i.e. obesity) can be avoided,

    2. has a positive expectation that by taking a recommended action, he/she will avoid that negative health condition (i.e., eating healthily will avoid obesity), and

    3. believes that he/she can successfully take a recommended health action (i.e., he/she knows what foods to eat and which to avoid, can cook a decent meal and can resist the siren call of that double chocolate chunk ice cream).

    Basically:
    - perceived effectiveness of the health behaviour.

    Add to that another four constructs representing the perceived threat and net benefits:
    - perceived susceptibility (If I'm obese, will I get obesity-related health problems?)
    - perceived severity (What are the obesity related problems? How bad would it be if I get those problems?)
    - perceived benefits (Will there be sufficient reward to giving up my chocolate and lasagna and chips? Will I actually avoid all those health problems?)
    - perceived barriers (Do I know what foods are healthy/unhealthy? Can I afford healthy foods and do I know where can I find them? Do I know how to cook a healthy meal? do I have the willpower to resist all those lovely snacks?)

    These concepts were proposed as accounting for people's "readiness to act." An added concept, cues to action, would activate that readiness and behavior. A recent addition to the HBM is the concept of self-efficacy, or one's confidence in the ability to successfully perform an action. Kind of significant if you are an undereducated, unemployed poor person on a deprived estate.

    So, what to do to get people to take action against obesity? Taxing won't help because it addresses none of the above issues (sure, money saved is another perceived benefit, but that doesn't stop smokers and drinkers and we all know what financial mess we are in as a nation. Saving money is not on the forefront of people's minds --spending it is).

    If you look at the model in the link provided, you note how not just education, but also socio-economic situation and knowledge play a role. If you live amongst fat people eating unhealthily, that is what you learn to do and accept as normal and unavoidable. That is what your palate adjusts to and everything else tastes strange. If you live on a deprived estate, you have few jollies in life except that bag of crisps, which is a darn site easier to obtain from the local newsagents than fresh fruit and vegetable. Besides dying of a heart attack may be a rather distant long-term risk compared to being stabbed in a mugging now.

    Moreover there is the issue of perceived benefits being in the long term and harder to achieve compared to the immediate gratification of that chocolate bar, and those perceived barriers (most people don't know how to pick healthy foods and avoid unhealthy ones, what adds up as calories, what is a "normal" sized meal, how to cook varied meals from scratch, and how not to give in to cravings, which are, to an extent, wired into our brain).

    Where obesity programmes have fallen flat in the past (much like any addictive behaviour programme), is that they try to change only one or a few of these factors. You have to change everything, all at the same time. This has been pulled off successfully in the past, using "Community Psychology". But it is a complex solution to a complex problem, not a simple sound-bite idea like "tax the fat" for simple minds.
     
  20. Nexxo

    Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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    Only if you believe that you (specifically) will get ill. See above.

    Doesn't seem to work for drug users, who tend to pay a lot more for their fix. People will get their fix somehow --if not one way, then another, possibly illegal, likely equally (or more) unhealthy way. I remind you of the Prohibition in the U.S.

    People have to choose to give up, not be coerced into it. Else they have no personal ownership of the decision.
     

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