Last week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid) announced it would remove the phrase “obesity itself cannot be considered an illness” from its policy books. The implication of this decision could be an enormous strain on taxpayers to subsidize treatment for the millions of Americans who are overweight.

Before this decision was made, Medicare only covered an obesity surgery if the applicant also suffered from another health problem such as heart disease or diabetes. Now, Americans may only need to be overweight to sucker Medicare into paying for stomach bypass surgery.

In most cases, obesity is a problem resulting from lifestyle decisions about what and how much to eat. With this new Medicare mantra, Americans are furthering the idea that we are all victims of society and have no responsibility for our own health. Restaurants continue to serve astronomical portions of food and consumers ignore the fat and sugar contents and gorge themselves to the point of corpulence.

It’s unfair for citizens who maintain healthy lifestyles and put effort into maintaining their weight to have to foot the bill for those who have “low metabolism” or “big bones.”

The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported Wednesday that nearly one-fourth of upstate New Yorkers are obese and that treating obesity-related illnesses costs around $6.1 billion a year statewide. That’s an enormous amount of money to treat a problem that is rooted in poor dietary choices and a sedentary lifestyle — not pre-existing physical conditions.

Insurance companies have higher premiums for those considered “higher risk,” including smokers and persons with family histories of cancer, but overeaters continue to be a protected class.

If the government would allow insurance companies to charge higher rates for overweight people who are at high risk for a whole slew of health problems, it would help to offset the high costs of treating these people’s heath problems.

The prospect of lower insurance premiums might also inspire some of them to lose weight.

At what point will people stop feeling sorry for themselves, get off the couch and do something about their eating habits?

By changing the medical status of obesity, Medicare is doing nothing to help the expanding weight problems of the American people. The program is simply giving more people an excuse to point fingers away from themselves and ignore the obligation to better their own lives.