Obama care

[Jackalope]

1) What is the average annualized cost of a smoker's health care vs. a non-smoker, amortized over their lifetime? In other words, how can you justify your statement that smokers should pay double?

1) That's for him to justify, but I doubt that he literally meant a mandate that requires all smokers to pay exactly twice as much everybody else does for health insurance, unless exactly twice as much was the extra cost involved.

I'm not sure that it's the case at all - and I'd love to see some hard data on the subject. It seems intuitive that on average, smokers die younger and faster than people with healthier lifestyles.

An anecdote (which is no substitute for hard date, but serves to illustrate why I raise the question). My mother-in-law was a heavy smoker and died (unsurprisingly) of lung cancer. My grandmother, a non-smoker, lived a relatively healthy lifestyle, developed Alzheimer's, and lived to a ripe old age, with the final 18 years of her life with 24/7 care. Guess who racked up the most health care expenses (by far)?

I'm not suggesting that my anecdote represents the average case. I honestly don't know, and I suspect that Manowar doesn't either. It is food for thought though.

In any case, absent a single payer system, it's largely irrelevant anyways. Within the scope of group plans offered by private insurers, everyone pays the same (which in my opinion, is the right way to do it).

Incidentally, I've been looking around, and there are HMO individual major medical plans offered (at least in my area) for under $200 per month. For healthy people that only want to protect from the risk of financial ruin from a major medical problem, it's an option.

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2) Would I support making people...,? 99.99% of the time my answer is going to be no. No, I don't want the government much involved in the first place.

From an idealistic perspective, I would agree with you on minimal government involvement. However, our system of health care delivery is horribly broken in so many ways that I abandoned that view some time ago. Public health care as it exists in Canada, Europe, the UK, etc. do have their problems - but to their credit they have solved problems that we in the US have not, despite paying more for health care per capita than anyone else in the world.