Mississippi House Bill 330 Misguided and Discriminatory

FOSTER CITY, Calif. - Jan. 25, 2015 - PRLog -- If Mississippi House Bill 330 were to become law, obese (based on BMI) Medicaid patients who refuse to sign up for an online program to help lose weight will be penalized by increasing their co-pay.  NAAFA, a civil rights organization working for Equality at Every Size, believes that this proposed law is discriminatory.

Targeting Medicaid recipients, made up of the poor and the elderly, forcing them to submit to programs that require foods that they may not be able to afford and penalizing them if they do not comply or cannot lose weight, is clearly inhumane. There is no other disease or condition that faces this kind of bias.

In 2014, the AMA declared obesity a disease. Since that time, this has been upheld by actions of the EEOC which has filed lawsuits on behalf of obese individuals and won those suits. Penalizing a person with a disease that has a multitude of treatments but no known cure is clearly discriminatory.

For supersize individuals at the highest end of the weight spectrum who are disabled by their weight, protections under the ADA are now clear. The requirement that a supersize person who is disabled by their weight achieve a target BMI to avoid a penalty would violate his/her rights, even if he/she might be able to do so via Herculean efforts.

Although it is understandable that the State of Mississippi wants to lower costs of health care, cost shifting cannot be based on a criteria that discriminates against those that are most vulnerable. A 2010 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report stated, “Even if there is no growth in the prevalence of obesity between now and 2020, per capita spending on health care for adults would rise by 65 percent—from $4,550 in 2007 to $7,500 in 2020 . . .  largely as a result of the continuation of underlying trends in health care that have led to rapidly increasing spending for all adults regardless of weight.”¹

NAAFA urges all concerned citizens to contact State Representative Omeria Scott (http://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/members/house/scott.xml) and Governor Phil Bryant (http://www.governorbryant.com/contact/) to express your objections to MS House Bill 330. Or feel free to sign our petition at:  https://www.change.org/p/phil-bryant-omeria-scott-stop-mississippi-house-bill-330Make your voice heard and stop this insanity.

Founded in 1969, NAAFA is a non-profit human rights organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for fat people. NAAFA works to eliminate discrimination based on body size and provide fat people with the tools for self-empowerment through public education, advocacy, and member support.

¹– How Does Obesity in Adults Affect Spending on Health Care? [2010]; Congressional Budget Office; http://www.cbo.gov/publication/21772

On the web:  http://www.naafa.org