Guess Who Wants to Tax You for Being Fat

I supposed it was inevitable that we’d learn that Jonathan Gruber wants to tax body weight:

“Ultimately, what may be needed to address the obesity problem are direct taxes on body weight,” Gruber wrote in an essay for the National Institute for Health Care Management in April 2010, just months after helping design ObamaCare with the president in the Oval Office and during the period in which he was under contract as an Obama administration consultant.

“While it is hard to conceive of this approach being a common public policy tool in the near term, such taxation may be happening indirectly through health insurance surcharges,” he wrote. “Currently, employers may charge up to 20 percent higher health insurance premiums for employees who fail to meet certain health-related standards, such as attaining a healthy BMI.”

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A couple of things.

The first is that BMI is a BS way to determine obesity, or much of anything else, really. But it’s easy to measure, especially if you just line up bunches of mostly-naked American Serfs™ for their annual IRS weigh-in. You might think I’m kidding, but if we’ve got to tax fat people, then we’ve got to weigh and measure them, and with 315 million Americans, the logistics get… busy. The Nazis used cattle cars, but I’m sure our tender IRS thugs would come up with something more humane.

The second is that if ♡bamaCare!!! saves us all this money, why do we have to keep coming up with new and ridiculous ways to finance it?

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Cross-posted from Vodkapundit

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