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Originally Posted by Schneed10

Agreed.

Jsarno, it's fine that if you want to smoke, you should be able to smoke. If you want to eat big macs and milkshakes for breakfast lunch and dinner, you should be able to.

But while you're doing that, is it fair for me to pay the same amount towards Medicare as you?

While you're doing whatever you want, exercising whatever freedoms you want, I'm paying for Medicare that you'll probably use twice as much as I will. That's the REAL unfair part in all of this. What people fail to realize is that their health choices do actually financially impact the rest of us. That's the very nature of a risk pool. So doing whatever you want and damn the consequences is actually a pretty selfish way to behave.

So I guess we should tax poor people more because they use more social programs more than others.