Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with Fitness Tracking

Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by gonzo41 on Sunday January 01, 2017 @09:41AM (#13295859)

Individuals should pay for their own bad choices. Im in Aus and a pack of smokes last year (yesterday) cost $28. Today $35. thats for 25 cigarettes. Taxes work. In america it's a little more tricky, and nailing down the cause of long term conditions is also tricky.

But if you're fat, smoke and don't do anything, and then you have a heart attack its kind of easy to link things together.

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by jjoonathan on Sunday January 01, 2017 @09:48AM (#13295875)

My understanding was that obese people and smokers ultimately cost less to insure because they tended to die relatively quickly and with less prolonged fuss. Should individuals pay for their own good choices?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.97488...

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by gonzo41 on Sunday January 01, 2017 @10:02AM (#13295924)

Interesting read. I guess is a balance of extra productivity from not dying vs getting rid of some smoker :P

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by TheCoelacanth on Sunday January 01, 2017 @12:43PM (#13296454)

Retirees tend not to have much productivity whether they are dead or not.

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by sten on Tuesday January 03, 2017 @03:23PM (#13312696)

Retired folk are (or can be) still an economic benefit as long as they live. Consider the trivial case of a grandparent watching children so the parents can have time to recover. But obesity and smoking do not kill people the day they leave work for the last time, it kills people in their 40s with years ahead of them to be productive.

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