It's your fault your sick - COA

Typical.

And not surprising. The latest bullshit to make the news from the Commission of Audit's report. It recommends that people should pay more for their private insurance if they engage in unhealthy behaviour. Or to put it another way, for the health fund to moralise to you about "unhealthy lifestyle choices". 

“Community rating is there to protect people who, through no fault of their own, through things they can’t control like their age, that they’re not penalised," he said. "But it shouldn’t protect people who deliberately engage in behaviours which add to their risk profile." 

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But Mr Barnes said it would be wrong to penalise people for things outside their control. 

"You shouldn't penalise people for their natural propensities," he said. "Just because somebody is fat doesn't necessarily mean that they should pay a higher private health insurance premium." 

Australian Medical Association president Steve Hambleton said there were better ways to help people improve their health than charging them higher insurance premiums. 

"It's the start of something really bad," he said. "It starts to blame individuals for their conditions."  Read more

Not that it would effect me. No private insurance health cover would touch me with a ten foot barge poll. But it sets a dangerous precedent if the gov adopts this. Just who decides what "lifestyle choices" are healthy or not?

For example, a perfectly healthy single guy is gay and lives in inner Sydney. Is part of the gay community there. He meets people and has casual safe sex. Would a health fund decide that his "lifestyle choices" put him at higher risk of getting HIV and other STD's? And therefore charge him a higher premium because of this?

You can't use health cover to moralise to people. It just doesn't work. Besides, treating someone ill should be available to everyone, whatever conditions have lead up to that illness. To do otherwise is to put unnecessary and destructive guilt onto the patient. A slap in the face when they're already ill. That's not what health care is all about.