Tough times for fatties, eh? We knew for years that the same forces of social engineering that marginalized American smokers would eventually target fat people. In the current health care reform debate, proposals for so-called sin taxes on fast food and sugary soda pop have bubbled up on Capitol Hill as possible revenue generators for the costly, proposed new programs. In recession-strapped New York, Governor David Paterson tried, and failed, to levy an 18 percent tax on soda pop. Last week President Obama remarked that the soda pop tax is 'an idea that we should be exploring.' 'Unfortunately the president has said some things that are extremely inaccurate and unhelpful with regards to this issue,' says Paul Campos, law professor at the University of Colorado and author of 'The Obesity Myth.' 'Obama said during the campaign that we could save a trillion dollars in health care costs by cutting obesity in half,' he adds, 'which is not only nonsensical but leaves aside the inconvenient fact that we don't know how to produce this result.' It's not just big government that is anxious to levy economic sanctions on the overweight (into whose ranks I fall, according to the Centers for Disease Control, with a societally disapproved 'body mass index' of 29). With Robespierrian ardor, school districts are removing Coke and Pepsi dispensers from their corridors, replacing them with machines that dole out orange and grape juice. Those have twice the sugar of the hated colas, but never mind that. Airlines have tightened their requirements that obese people pay for an extra seat rather than discomfit neighboring passengers. Just last week Southwest Airlines insisted that a plus-size passenger buy a second seat, prompting a made-for-Fox-News soap opera that in fact ended up on Fox News. Overt job discrimination against fat people is generally illegal, but studies have shown that the overweight and obese are less likely to be hired than their more fit contemporaries. The chief executive of the Cleveland Clinic, which stopped hiring smokers two years ago, recently told The New York Times that he wouldn't hire obese people either, if he could get away with it. Dr. Delos Cosgrove went on to mention that some economists believe overweight people should be required to pay higher health insurance premiums because of their condition. For the moment, that is not legal in Massachusetts, but it is legal in other parts of the country. This isn't a subject that health insurers are anxious to discuss. A Washington-based coalition called America's Health Insurance Plans acknowledges that overeating and other unhealthy habits drive up health care premiums, but doesn't have data on premium disparities for individual health plans. 'That's going to vary from plan to plan, and state by state,' says spokesman Robert Zirkelbach. The AHIP wants Congress to require citizens to buy health insurance, which would theoretically eliminate costlier premiums based on health status. 'Obesity has been hijacked by the debate over socialized medical care,' Campos comments, 'which has everything to do with our cultural obsession with body weight and nothing to do with medicine.' Campos likes to parse the CDC's famous Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to show that healthy, overweight people ('You are going to live forever,' he assured me when he learned my BMI) live longer than 'normal' people with baseline BMIs in the low 20s. 'The relative risk of mortality is lower than the baseline all the way to a body mass index of 35,' he says, 'and that's true for morbidity, too. We focus on these 'risks' because of the supposed desirability of thinness, not because of any rational cost-benefit analysis.' One pill makes you ... Here is an interesting take on obesity, from 'The Pills That Make Us Fat,' published by Paula Caplan, a Harvard researcher, in New Scientist magazine: 'One culprit is rarely mentioned: the broad range of psychiatric drugs that can cause substantial weight gain. They include drugs marketed as antidepressants (such as amitriptyline, doxepin and imipramine), mood stabilisers (including lithium and valproate) and antipsychotics (including clozapine, olanzapine and chlorpromazine). After 10 years on lithium, for example, two-thirds of patients put on around 10 kilograms ((22 pounds)). ... 'Overall, around 50 million Americans - that's 1 in 6 of the population - currently take at least one psychotropic drug.' I asked Caplan if her article had attracted comments from Big Pharma, and she replied: 'No, pharmaceutical companies are much too powerful to need to bother with me.' 