Burdened with ever-rising costs of health care, American employers are increasingly requiring their employees to make lifestyle changes or pay extra for them. In the instance of one Indiana firm, for instance, a smoker is required to pay an additional $5.00 per pay period to cover the extra healthcare costs of smoking-related illness, while someone whose blood-cholesterol count is above a specified level must similarly pay more for health care than a colleague with a cholesterol count at or below that level. High blood pressure, obesity, alcoholism, and other conditions, that Indiana firm says, will be charged on the same à la carte basis.
Some workers and unions have objected that employers have no business regulating employees’ off-hours behavior. Other commentators, however, insist that it is in the employers’ interest to have a healthy workforce, and that it is within the rights of those employers and society at large to use the market to discourage bad habits.
Knowing of your background in economics, your employer has asked you to write a 500-page white paper addressed to her in which you advise her what position the company should take. Should the company establish a policy of differential premiums for lifestyle-related risks to health? Should it adopt a hands-off policy on an employee’s private behavior and charge all employees the same premium?
Your employer also asks you to consider this question: Would you have a different position if the costs of health insurance were borne by the state, and not by the company?
Please cite some recent article from the Wall Street Journal to give specific weight to your argument. Regardless of your position, it will help your case to have a handle on healthcare costs overall, as well as the costs of illnesses that are presumed to be lifestyle-related. Please be sure to include such figures in your argument. On another note, you will save yourself loss of points by properly distinguishing between “health care” as a noun and “healthcare” as an adjective.
For more on the white paper format, see https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/546/1/. Do not use subheads, as some examples show; these are appropriate to longer papers, but not to this short, 500-word piece.
Your white paper must carry a title and byline (for example, A Case for Suppressing Marijuana / by Adam Smith, where the slash represents a return and new line). Otherwise, review the syllabus and go down the checklist before submitting this assignment. Be sure to work an economic concept into the discussion.
