Maggie Mahar: “That an industry that manufactures poison has been able to block health care reform is not just ironic, it’s tragic. Going forward, reformers need to push back by reminding voters that if all Americans stopped smoking””beginning with this generation of teens””that would do more to improve the health of the nation that any other reform.”
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A very unimpressive article.
There are good reasons to oppose such a measure that have nothing to do with that knee jerk cliche, “Big Tobacco is evil!!!”. Attaching health care funding to maintaining a large number of smoker seems like a pretty wretched idea. Instituting a regressive tax that hits poor people most of all seems like a pretty wretched idea. And having government dictate personal choices by taxing the politically unpopular ones seems like a pretty wretched idea. It’s not about evil people lobbying. It’s about people using common sense to know a bad idea when they see one.
Governments already make more money on the sale of a pack of cigarettes than the companies that produce them do. If you’re looking to assign financial motivations for things, first and foremost, governments are the profiteers that deserve scrutiny.
And we’ve been over the silliness of disease prevention equalling cost savings on this site before. The odds that fewer cases of lung cancer in smokers would actually save long term money are extremely shaky at best.
Funding government health care programs with sin taxes like cigarette taxes is a universally bad and unjustifiable idea. And I don’t even work for the “evil” scapegoats she seems to hate so much.
I wish she would have done a little more thinking before she did her writing.
I agree with the first comment. Every since I entered medical school, the medical profession has been in a phase of confusing it’s responsibility to educate patients about the dangers of smoking with a Holy Crusade against Big Tobacco. Somethings I think it is more a social phenomenon than scientific one. Some of it reeks of Hitler fulminating against the Jews to distract the masses from what he was doing.
All was going to be well in medicine when we sued Big Tobacco to get them to pay for all the health damage. The result was predictable. The legal profession and porking politicians got the loot. We got nothing which is what pigs deserve.
Now the states are basically in business partnership with the tobacco companies, dependent on them for tax revenue, at the same time fearful of looting them (actually their customers) lest they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs–gold extracted from the ignorant, the poor, the mentally unstable who find nicotine one of their few pleasures.
Meanwhile the other even dirtier half of the secret is that if everyone really gave up tobacco, not only would the welfare state be out a source of revenue, the costs would go up because the reality is that smokers take fewer public resources than non-smokers by dint of being kind enough to die closer to retirement age.
It is so old, so irrational, so silly, that it makes one want to barf every time one hears “Big Tobacco”.
Tobacco is a plant folks, just a little plant, an humble little weed that makes people feel good when they absorb it’s products, and makes them liable to die somewhat younger than their non-smoking brethern–who are going to die themselves nontheless and usually after soaking up more of my tax dollars.
Tobacco companies are just business like any other, and should no more be asked to bear the cost of government socialism than sofa makers should be asked to fund peoples obesity related treatments.
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