So the general “theme” of all of these is tax/financial incentives to engage in physical fitness or open physical fitness related companies.
Collecting less in tax revenue and/or giving rebates for people getting more healthy should actually save the government money in the long run because it will reduce the governments medicaid/medicare expenses if everyone was healthier.
Many health insurance providers already have programs like this, and the logic and precedent is sound, people who are in better health don’t have to pay as much for insurance because they are less expensive. There should actually be a lot of data on this type of thing out there, if you know where to look.
So why not apply the knowledge to the government so we can all pay less taxes, the government pays less for healthcare, and we all are more healthy.
-
Sales Tax holiday on fitness equipment. I don’t know how this is federally but I know in my state at least (Texas) we have annual sales tax holiday on school supplies and clothes. I believe the incentive was so parents would buy their children new school supplies/clothes every school year. Why not have one for fitness equipment? Could be activewear, excercise products (weights, treadmills), bicycles, etc. to incentivize people to buy fitness equipment.
-
Tax deduction for gym memberships. Allow gym memberships to fall under a FSA, or allow people to deduct this expense when they file their taxes, or both.
-
Tax rebate for excercise. General idea would be you’d get a fitness tracker, or use your phone’s step counter, and link it to an app. If you average a certain amount of excercise every day, you get a tax rebate when filing your return, or it could be a scaling return depending on how much excercise you do, with an upper and lower limit.
-
Business incentives to open gyms. How about just giving businesses that run gyms a tax rebate? This should make operating a gym more profitable, which will make more gyms open in more areas, and likely lowering membership costs as their profit margin is higher.
-
Public gyms. Simple really, like city-run public gyms with finess equipment, paid by property taxes similar to city parks? The closest thing we really have to that is like in public schools sport’s teams, but those aren’t for the general public only when you are a student.
Obviously a lot of these would need the fine workings tuned out to get the numbers right, but I think the general direction of it is solid. What do you guys n’ gals think?