That’s the sound of my head exploding. You wanted more dispatches from crazy town? Well, here you go: CVS is requiring all of its employees to provide medical information, or face a monetary penalty (an additional $600 per year or $50 per month). They’re being asked to submit weight, BMI, and glucose levels. Strangely, CVS says they aren’t going to do anything with this information (last night on the news, I even heard that they claim the information will never leave the employees’ doctors’ offices) – they just want to know that this information has been collected. Sure.
Here’s the thing: Eventually, CVS is going to use this information to categorize their employees as healthy or unhealthy. And then they are going to penalize the unhealthy employees, and charge them more for health insurance. Why else would they want this information? They are making it sound like they’re doing employees a favor, making them aware of their health status, but I’m convinced this is just the first step in using health indicators to discriminate against fat people.
Why do I say that? Because they want to know your weight and your BMI. What’s BMI got to do with anything? As we’ve discussed before, it’s just a mathematical formula that some guy made up, and he never expected it to be used to be an indicator of health. So, CVS wants to know how fat you are in two ways – your weight on the scale, and your place on the BMI spectrum. As we know from the constant barrage of news and advertisements, fat is an epidemic and is costing us all a lot of money. So if CVS can figure out how many of its employees are fat, then they can jack the cost of health insurance up on those people, because obviously those people are going to be the ones using up all the health care because of the unending and costly health problems that all fat people have.
Sorry, I forgot to use the sarcasm font on that last bit.
Here’s the deal: We have to stop discriminating against people based on weight. We have to stop assuming that all fat people are unhealthy – and that all thin people are healthy. I’d like CVS to tell me how they are going to suss out the employees who engage in other unhealthy behaviors. Are they going to demand food journals, to see who’s pulling through the fast food drive-thru every night on the way home from work? No, instead they are just going to assume that the fat people are the ones doing that. Are they going to ask employees to track how many times they work out each week? No, instead they are just going to assume that the non-fat people are the ones doing that.
The common consensus is that more and more companies are going to follow in CVS’s footsteps. Great. So instead of just being unspoken and pervasive, it’s going to become official, public company policy to discriminate against fat people. I’m sure that this pressure, shame, and discrimination will magically make fat people skinny forever. I guess we should all line up to thank CVS for such a miracle!
