Don't punish the obese; encourage them instead
I was disappointed to read in the News & Record (July 29) that some employers are making overweight workers pay if they do not lose weight. Obesity is a challenge facing millions of individuals today, but there have to be better alternatives to fighting it.
Will people who smoke, drink, use drugs and create hostile work environments also be charged a fee for contributing to workplace stress, low productivity and absenteeism?
Perhaps there is a simple solution to support the needed slimming of America. Employers and insurance companies could provide weight-loss programs and covered services for folks who meet the medical definition of obesity. Those of us who could benefit from obesity education and prevention are hit with out-of-pocket, uncovered expenses if we need these services.
A recent check of my own health insurance coverage lists the availability of counseling, treatment and professional services for smoking cessation, mental health and substance-abuse issues. Weight loss is not covered.
Doesn't it make more sense to provide low-cost or free medical weight-loss services now, instead of paying for cancer, diabetes and heart disease treatment later? If obesity is truly an epidemic, then how about funding educational, preventative and medically based programs before it is too late?
Al Jeffers
Jamestown
Comments (5)
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punish the obese? Come-on, a bread and water diet is the obvious sentence.
Posted on August 4, 2007 5:27 AM
Try eating less, and working out more, it worked for me.
Posted on August 4, 2007 6:11 AM
Americans are put on a path towards obesity --- from an early age, as I explain in a published letter below:
Kids and Exercise
Letter, EDUCATION NEXT
Spring, 2007
http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/6022631.html
Thanks to �Don�t Sweat It� (features, Fall 2006) and �Not Your Father�s PE� (research, Fall 2006), we now know that top-down solutions to child obesity offer minimal benefit. A �bottom-up� approach would be to change the way we fund schooling. We fund systems; we do not fund students. Because districts tend to add classrooms to existing structures as enrollment grows, we have large schools.
District consolidation also put us on the road to supersize schools. In 1931, there were 120,000 school districts. By 2000, there were fewer than 15,000. University of Chicago professor Christopher Berry (�School Inflation,� research, Fall 2004) studied the period of greatest school-district consolidation, 1930�70. Berry found a consistent correlation of .70 between school size and district size, across states. Big districts have big schools.
How do big schools lead to inactive, overweight kids? To go to and from big, consolidated schools�often at remote sites�children wait for and sit in buses instead of walking or bicycling to a nearby school and playing in the schoolyard before and after the bell. High schoolers and middle schoolers are doubly afflicted: when they finally arrive at their very large schools, they find that the most popular sports are dominated by elite athletes. A glance at almost any high-school annual of the 1920s through the 1950s (before the final wave of consolidation) will reveal a lot of skinny young people, small senior classes, and wide participation in the major sports.
Were we to fund students rather than systems, such schools�and skinny kids�would make a comeback.
Tom Shuford
Retired Public School Teacher
Lenoir, North Carolina
COMMENT: Smaller, community-controlled schools would likely benefit adults as well, as the would spend less time sitting in autos chauferring their youngsters around and, as schools were once centers of neighborhood and community life, might do a bit more walking themselves to neighborhood functions.
Posted on August 4, 2007 6:34 AM
Could not agree less, Tom. Bigger is always better. Look at all the corporate mergers and the wonderful success it has brought America.
Just kidding. Of course I feel the opposite and support for schools (as well as most businesses) the anti-consolidation path you have suggested above.
Posted on August 4, 2007 7:16 AM
Mr. Jeffers, is it not realized that obesity is not a trendy or chic disease like smoking, drug addiction, etc?
Those latter things are not unaesthetic like obesity. Take aesthetics out of the equation and employers and health insurers would do something.
Shalom
Posted on August 4, 2007 10:01 AM