Texas Hospital bans overweight people

http://www.myfoxphoenix.com/dpp/news...rkers_48467883

Commentary

Victoria Hospital in Texas has stated they will no longer hire anyone with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 35 or higher. To put that in perspective, that's 210 pounds for someone 5', 5".
On the one hand, it makes sense that your health care provider is, well, healthy. So of course they also are excluding people with a BMI below 18.5 (110 pounds for that same 5', 5" person), because that's considered unhealthy too.

Oh, never mind. They aren't really. It's only the fat people who are getting excluded.

Now, for the record, with rare exceptions, if you are overweight it's because you eat too much and exercise too little. Decrease the calories and increase the exercise and you will lose weight. (I'm fully prepared for the "but I have [insert medical condition]" comments, but honestly, if you truly cannot lose weight by diet and exercise you are in the minority.) And because being overweight is essentially voluntary, and not something like race that you cannot change, companies should be allowed to make rules around it.
Am I too fat to get hired?
But being allowed to make such rules is far different from saying that they should. They should not. This is a ridiculous policy that will come back to (forgive the expression) bite them. First of all, "obese" is not what you think it is. Here's a Flickr set of photographs of real people along with their BMIs. Click through a few and your perceptions may change. For instance, there's this woman who has a BMI slightly over 35 and would be rejected by this hospital. She looks overweight to me, but if I saw her on the street I certainly wouldn't think she was "obese."

Here are five reasons this is a really bad policy:
1. You will lose out on some great candidates. Being smart and a hard worker doesn't mean you'll be automatically thin. Do you really want to exclude candidates based on something that has no relationship to their performance? While unemployment is high, it's not so high that you can afford to make blanket exclusions.
2. BMI is actually a poor predictor of health. It considers all weight the same, regardless of whether you are a well muscled athlete or a pudgy couch potato. Additionally, gender and race are not taken into consideration. If your goal is to lower health costs by hiring only the healthy, you've picked the wrong qualifier. Many scientists think it's outdated.
3.It may be illegal -- although not in the way you think. Only a few states and cities prohibit discrimination based on weight, but there is also the problem of disparate impact. This is where you have a policy that looks neutral but has a disproportionate impact on a particular group. In the case of BMI, African-American women are more likely to be overweight, according to BMI. You do not want a policy that will end up discriminating against any group, especially one built on shaky science.
4. What do you do when your star employee gains weight? Don't think it will happen? You're a bit naive. When that surgeon who brings in the big bucks packs on the pounds, do you fire him? If not, be prepared for the lawsuit from the $10 an hour worker of a different race or gender.

5. It's bad public relations. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just operate your business outside of the court of public opinion? Well, you can't. Now if you Google "Victoria Hospital Texas," three references to the obesity policy show up on the the first page of hits. Is that what you want prospective patients, donors, and employees to know about you? Probably not.
Before you implement any policy, you really need to think through the total consequences. Make the policy fit the actual problem you want to correct -- if you're concerned about overweight nurses not being able to adequately care for patients, make your standards around ability to care for a patient, regardless of weight.

So then are they going to reject people who drink, smoke, are promiscuous, do drugs both illegal and prescribed? And what about people who are underweight, scrawny, or straggly, maybe they're undernourished or anorexic. Are they going to be tested or simply turned away on sight? What about short people, will that be next? So who's going to be left only the young, and perfect? I know plenty of under weight coach potatoes, being thin is just in their genes. It's not proof of them being healthy and active.

Makes perfectly good sense to me from a business perspective, but I wouldn't have announced it to anyone, rather, my recruiters would simply have not hired them. Obese people are a huge drain on profits and the morale of the other employees. Most estimates place the cost at around 75 billion per year. If Obamacare stands, this will become standard practice as more employers are forced to deal with rising healthcare costs, and this issue is a no-brainer, financially.

You do understand that being overweight doesn't necessarily equate to being unhealthy? I know quite a few skinny people who are very unhealthy. Did you look at the picture of the gal in the commentary? About half the women on this site would be excluded from being hired. BMI is an outdated way of assessing health. Big boned structure and muscle mass like in the case of Arnold Swartzenneger would put him over their BMI requirement. Its gonna be real interesting to see what happens should people decide to take them to court on this. Some of my best positive experiences after my surgeries were of a caring knowledgable nurse in charge of my recovery who would have been considered obese by this hospital. I will take a nurse like that over someone with a so called healthy appearance any day.

You do understand that being overweight doesn't necessarily equate to being unhealthy? I know quite a few skinny people who are very unhealthy. Did you look at the picture of the gal in the commentary? About half the women on this site would be excluded from being hired. BMI is an outdated way of assessing health. Big boned structure and muscle mass like in the case of Arnold Swartzenneger would put him over their BMI requirement. Its gonna be real interesting to see what happens should people decide to take them to court on this. Some of my best positive experiences after my surgeries were of a caring knowledgable nurse in charge of my recovery who would have been considered obese by this hospital. I will take a nurse like that over someone with a so called healthy appearance any day. Originally Posted by Sexyeccentric1

There will always be exceptions in every situation. From a statistical point of view, obesity = higher costs to businesses, it's that simple and is factual. There is no law that prevents a business from discriminating against obese people, but you are probably right, I'm sure someone will try and make a buck off of it if it means they can stay home and eat.

I know we would all love a nurse or nurses who looked like this



But in reality our nurses look like this.. particularly the nurse in the middle would not be hired on the hiring format that that particular hospital has.



Or a doctor who is very qualified like this gal



These people are not a financial drain.. and they do not cause the moral of others to suffer. If anything a person who is overweight has had a lot of adversity in their life and generally is more uplifting to others because of those experiences as opposed to someone who looks like they stepped out of a magazine and had no adversity and most likely is a bit spoiled.

Not all people who are overweight have health issues. But alas I guess we are going to stereotype and stigmatize the people who have weight issues and pull out all the "cliches" on them.

I wonder what would happen if a Law Firm had the same hiring practices. No lawyer could be hired if their BMI was over a particular limit? Or say no one could take on a CEO position of a company because their BMI is over a limit allowed by a company? Wonder how many men from this site would be disqualified?

There is a big difference between being morbidly obese and just being overweight. You could be 30 lbs over your normal weight and be considered overweight by this hospital.

I fought this insanity in the military for year. My BMI was about 26 % but I ranked in the top 3% in running our miles, could dead lift 365 pounds, put 150% of my body weight over my head and one time cranked out 1,000 sit ups in four hours on a bet. My most stupid stunt was to run 17 miles in cowboy boots. Ouch! During this entire time I was border line obese or overweight. What a joke.