NPR reports on a troubling proposal: penalizing insured individuals who don't maintain a low enough body mass index or BMI. New proposed regulations would permit employers to charge workers more for health insurance if they are overweight as measured by BMI.
There are several problems here. For instance, experts explain that millions of healthy Americans are technically "overweight" if BMI is used as a metric, and that using BMI would discriminate against African-Americans, Latinos, and low-income Americans, who are more likely to have a high BMI.
The story is well worth a listen, here.
