[throwaway118899]

> One the primary goals of any - and indeed every - medical system is to ration resources.

We can fix this. Essentially, every smoker, every alcoholic, and every obese human immediately goes to the back of the line.

No need for this convoluted bullshit of a system.

[roenxi]

Firstly, that is still a convoluted bullshit system for rationing healthcare. Logically you'd have to assign some sort of worthiness score to every activity that matters then track everyone to figure out their score and stop them lying to get to the front of the queue. Even if you literally only mean these 3 things, you'd have to track smoking and alcohol consumption. I doubt that'd be enough to effectively ration healthcare though, since the resource demand is practically infinite.

Secondly, you're inviting some really complex moral and political arguments. There have been worse ideas than linking healthcare to a political assessment of lifestyle, but I suspect it'd be up there in the same orbit as communism, genocide and slavery. It is hard to see it ending well once the politicians start to disagree on the healthiness of people's lifestyles.

I dunno, in some ghoulish sense it might be the next logical thing for the US to try. Why stop at merely bad ideas?

[nradov]

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) does allow health plans to charge higher premiums to smokers. Implementation varies by state. I'm sure that a lot of plan members just lie to avoid the surcharge.

https://www.kff.org/faqs/faqs-health-insurance-marketplace-a...

[roenxi]

That doesn't put smokers at the back of any queues. They still get resources roughly in line with the amount of money that they have.