Posted on 04/15/2002 6:04:02 PM PDT by Max McGarrity
If there's any lingering doubt that corporate America has fully taken over health care, let it now be put to rest: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are lamenting smoking deaths in part because ... people die too early and thus truncate their productive years.
That's one of the conclusions of a new CDC report on smoking-related deaths, which reveals that from 1995 to 1999, cigarette smoking caused 440,000 premature deaths in the United States, more for men (264,000) than for women (178,000). And damn if that didn't rob the economy of $81.9 billion in lost worker productivity, not to mention $75.5 billion in excess medical costs in 1998 alone, money that HMOs otherwise could have saved by denying surgeries and prescription drugs.
It gets better.
After playing with early death and lost-productivity numbers, the CDC further concludes the costs to the nation of each pack of cigarettes is $7.18. That's $3.45 for medical care related to smoking, and $3.73 for lost productivity. That's an average, says the CDC, of $3,391 per smoker, per year. (Charitably, the CDC did not include the productivity losses of lost work time from smoking disabilities, absenteeism, excess work breaks and the nasty effects of secondhand smoke.)
The figures beg the question: If the real costs of smoking are that high, and smoking taxes aren't keeping pace, shouldn't we raise taxes to pay for the CDC's prescribed efforts to cut smoking in half by 2010?
The figures also beg the question: Are these people serious?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes. "The stunning toll that smoking takes on life is unacceptable," Rosemarie Henson, director of the CDC's smoking and health office, says in a news release. "States and communities can and should do more to reduce the impact of smoking on the physical and financial health of their communities."
Lay aside for a moment the underlying assumption that each person is indentured to corporate America, and that anything he does to reduce his contribution -- puffing on a Marlboro, surfing the Net at work or playing hooky to hit the links -- is a form of theft. Consider the approach of the CDC, all-too-often embraced by the left when it wants to ban something it doesn't like: Society pays when an individual does something unhealthful.
That's why you can't ride a motorcycle without a helmet. That's why you can't talk on a cellular telephone and drive at the same time. That's why you should wear your seat belt. That's why you shouldn't eat fast food. That's why you shouldn't drink beer. That's why you can't shop at Wal-Mart.
Because it costs all of us.
It's never so simple as a person doing something he enjoys, whether it be having a cigarette, smoking a cigar, drinking a beer or chowing down a nice steak. Someone couldn't possibly do those things without causing the rest of us harm, could they? After all, no man is an island.
But with more and more people adopting the takes-a-village philosophy for adults as well as children, fleeing to a deserted island is starting to sound better and better. We can import the steak, cigars and Scotch, but please, hold the Health Nazis.
Here in Nevada, the arguments are louder and more visceral. The state, says the CDC, had 3,359 deaths attributable to smoking in 1999, and 29.1 percent of all adults here smoke. (The national median is 23.3 percent.) The state's smoking-related productivity losses were $762 million in 1999. And yet, the state collected a mere $61 million in cigarette taxes and $37.8 million in tobacco settlement funds, some of which were used for things (Millennium Scholarships) unrelated to health care. (An interesting point: If people do stop smoking, the tobacco settlement dollars will start to dwindle. It's a wonder the tobacco companies don't take out ads that encourage people to "smoke a bit for a scholarship." Oh, that's right: The government says they can't.)
The CDC is right to note the dangers of smoking: You can get lung cancer, you can become more susceptible to illness and you can increase your chances of dying an early death. Everybody understand? Good. Now will the nags who take such great joy in telling the rest of us how to run our lives please shut up?
Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist. His column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 383-0283 or by e-mail at ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.
/john
Smoking may cost corporations in lost productivity but it saves money for the Federal Government. Smokers tend to die early, hence, less strain on the SS System.
LOL, oh my Gawd, there is nothing worse than a morbidly obese smoker!
These are the last of the unacceptable vices left to humankind!
Only if they "belong" to the corporations. Actually, a recent study by Rand proved that neither smoking nor obesity was as costly in lost productivity as poverty. So why are they trying to create MORE poverty by taxing smokers out of all their money?
What a crock of clinton: The fuzzy CDC science data re smokers dying early does not account for many other factors such as sedentary life style, burgers and fries, etc. Smokers do fit such a pattern
I get a barf alert every time I read the latest spewing from the Smoking Gestapo.
What BS. Big companies like Ford Motor for example, make it a point to encourage (buy out/coerce/withold promotions/layoff/fire, etc.) employees in their mid thirties to forties (the most productive years) to leave because they don't want to pay the pension and health insurance of potentialy healthy retires.
Been there, done that.
Sui
Job security and control. Perfect totalitarian formula.
These S.O.B.'s need to get their story straight.
To say nothing of AIDS, the 100% verified fatal disease.
doesn't exist as far as the taxman and the CDC is concerned.
Isn't PC "science" wonderful?
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