I've seen some people continue to comment and post about Japan's Fat Tax, so I decided to post this article that was written earlier this year in it's own topic for people to read about how it hasn't worked out as they planned.
blogs.afp.com/correspondent/
So over half the people that are meant to undergo their annual exams don't even bother, and barely any of them that exceed the national limits follow the medical advice given to them, apparently.
blogs.afp.com/correspondent/
Dubbed the “metabo law” -- after metabolic syndrome, Japan’s official name for obesity – the new rules were approved in 2008 by the Japanese parliament, an assembly which, by some weird quirk of happenstance, is called the National Diet.
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Businesses and local governments are supposedly meant to measure the waists of all workers aged between 40 and 74 during their annual medical checkup. The official limit is 85 cm (33.5 inches) for men, 90 cm (35.4 inches) for women.
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OK, so you’re not going to prison for an extra pinch of flesh. The real pressure is on businesses. The government called on firms to trim the number of overweight workers by 10 percent in the law’s first four years and by 25 percent in 2015. Companies risk fines if they miss these targets.
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Officials are discussing adapting the law so that a waistline measurement is not the only metric. A health ministry official said authorities were currently discussing new standards, because recent research shows the relationship between girth and heart disease is more complex than initially thought. A report by the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), for example, found that a woman could still be classed as overweight, even if her waistline was around 80 cm -- 10 cm below the official limit, if her ratio of height to weight fell outside certain parameters. Go figure.
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Hayashi isn’t convinced by the metabo law. “For me, it’s a failure because it’s not been effective,” he says, citing health ministry figures that show of the 52 million or so people aged between 40 and 74 who are meant to undergo annual exams, less than half do so, about 23 million. “Out of these people, a little more than four million are beyond the limits, so are given written recommendations. But only 12.3 percent of these people follow through on this medical advice.”
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Businesses and local governments are supposedly meant to measure the waists of all workers aged between 40 and 74 during their annual medical checkup. The official limit is 85 cm (33.5 inches) for men, 90 cm (35.4 inches) for women.
-
OK, so you’re not going to prison for an extra pinch of flesh. The real pressure is on businesses. The government called on firms to trim the number of overweight workers by 10 percent in the law’s first four years and by 25 percent in 2015. Companies risk fines if they miss these targets.
-
Officials are discussing adapting the law so that a waistline measurement is not the only metric. A health ministry official said authorities were currently discussing new standards, because recent research shows the relationship between girth and heart disease is more complex than initially thought. A report by the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), for example, found that a woman could still be classed as overweight, even if her waistline was around 80 cm -- 10 cm below the official limit, if her ratio of height to weight fell outside certain parameters. Go figure.
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Hayashi isn’t convinced by the metabo law. “For me, it’s a failure because it’s not been effective,” he says, citing health ministry figures that show of the 52 million or so people aged between 40 and 74 who are meant to undergo annual exams, less than half do so, about 23 million. “Out of these people, a little more than four million are beyond the limits, so are given written recommendations. But only 12.3 percent of these people follow through on this medical advice.”
So over half the people that are meant to undergo their annual exams don't even bother, and barely any of them that exceed the national limits follow the medical advice given to them, apparently.
11 years