Sam's

I went to Sam's Club yesterday for the bi-weekly restocking of my office refridgerator and caught a glimpse of this woman in line next to me. Besides her morbidly obese apperance I also noticed the contents of her cart.

She had a 2 pack of Zest soap totalling 24 bars. I can understand why she buys in bulk. This will probably last a month.

I especially liked the two 2-foot hoagies, the two gallons of punch, and to wash it all down, a case of Bud Light. At least she's watching her calorie intake. She also had a huge package of tube socks.

Everyone goes to the store for specific items and then a few other things are picked up as impulse buys. I would imagine the food stuffs were her specific target this run but the socks really confused me. Did she need them or were they impulse?

I started running through a lot of assumptions about this woman after I remembered a sobering statistic about the obese. A company with 1000 employees will spend $285,000 on medical bills and other costs associated with absenteeism due to obesity. Just one obese person will cost a company anywhere from $460 to $2500 annually.

There have been a lot of articles lately about obesity here in Hawaii including a lot of focus on fat kids. I believe I made a post about this earlier this month so I won't cover it here. I will reiterate something that firmly believe in and that is obese people should pay more for health care. Endogenously obese or, more specifically, the environmentally induced obese are the targets for my thesis statement.

Envirionmentally obese people, or the couch potatoes, should be made to pay more in health insurance to offset the costs associated with treating them. They are more prone to Type II diabetes, joint problems, etc. so it only seems fair to have them pay more for health insurance.

Many people say this is unfair treatment and discrimination. Putting political correctness and emotion aside, people are made to pay more for for all types of insurance because of their risk factors. If you live in a tornado infested area that loses trailers every year, live in an area that gets smacked by hurricanes or earthquakes then you will pay more for homeowners insurance. If you smoke you pay more for life insurance. If you drive like an asshole and get tickets you will pay more for auto insurance.

These are all choices people make. They choose to drive poorly, to live in a risky area for their homes, to kill themselves by smoking. Why shouldn't a fat fuck who eats Big Mac's all day and who does not exercise pay more for health insurance?