Opinion: Should smokers, obese people pay more for insurance?

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Yea to charging smokers more, say 60 percent of Americans in a new survey.

Yea to charging obese people more, say 29 percent of Americans in the same survey.

Here’s the full text of the survey.

On the surface, this would seem to indicate contradictory attitudes toward personal responsibility. Obesity is, in most cases, a lifestyle choice not much different than smoking: Why shouldn’t overweight people accept the consequences of that choice just like smokers? But it gets more interesting when we see that only 12 percent of the respondents said people should have to pay more if they have genetic predispositions to cancer or heart disease. The clear difference is that you can’t help it if you’ve got bad health in your family. To the extent poll results are ever meaningful, this suggests more Americans are rejecting the idea of an ‘obesity epidemic’ over which people have no control.