CVS Pharmacy recently announced their plan to penalize employees who have a higher BMI than they deem acceptable. At the same time their own diversity policy states:
"We celebrate differences in age, gender, family status, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, appearance, thought and mannerisms."
Their argument is
that overweight employees incur higher health care costs, and that it's
unfair for others to have to share the burden of those costs. Why should
folks who eat organic foods and work out every day have to pay for
their couch potato colleagues when the 'taters have a heart attack?
Other companies have imposed similar fines on smoking employees citing
similar logic.
The truth is, if this was really
about fairness CVS' policy would have to include people with high blood
pressure, whether they're overweight or not. And what about people with
arthritis or kidney disease or congenital heart issues? They'd certainly
have to impose a pretty steep fine on homosexuals since they are at far
higher risk of contracting AIDS and other costly illnesses.
By the way, if we're looking at risk of possible future
health care costs we'd also need to include people who ski or mountain
bike or skydive or run marathons. Really, anyone who is not currently
sick or injured but who has a high likelihood of becoming sick or injured due to activities they engaged in.
Wait
a minute . . . isn't that the inherent definition of insurance? Isn't
insurance a form of risk management used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss?
Do we know that an overweight person will become sick? Do we know that a
marathon runner will develop shin splints or a sprained ankle? Of
course not! These are uncertain losses, risks we have agreed to
collectively share in the event of illness or injury.
A policy like this institutionalizes intolerance, while expecting us to swallow that it's in the name of fairness.
At
the end of the day, a company which cares so little for the privacy and
dignity of its employees cannot be trusted to care for the privacy and
dignity of its customers. CVS has every right to do what they want with
their own business. Likewise, I have the right to drive past CVS and
travel the extra mile down the road to Walgreens, which is exactly what
I'll be doing from now on.