Long live (not so much) smokers

2 comments April 9th, 2009

As a smoker-who-is-not-smoking-at-the-moment, I loved this Associated Press story that I found this morning on HealthyRockford.com.

Here’s an excerpt: “A Dutch study published last year in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal said that health care costs for smokers were about $326,000 from age 20 on, compared with about $417,000 for thin and healthy people.”

U.S. studies show the same things: Smokers actually SAVE us money. Because smokers die about 10 years sooner than non-smokers, smokers cost less over the long-haul than non-smokers.

Talk about a conundrum: Here we’ve created a society in which smokers have the cache of sex offenders and in which government is taxing the box out of cigarettes — all in an effort to reduce smoking and increase revenue.

So much effort into things that aren’t going to deliver the results expected. We’ll end up with a bankrupt health-pension-old-people care system because we convinced everyone to quit smoking so they’d live longer (and now cost way more), just when so many quit smoking that there’s no revenue increase to fund it all.

Had we left smokers alone, they’d have enjoyed their vice in peace, paid those crippling taxes to increase the revenue stream, and died off fast enough to not be a financial drain on the remaining thin, healthy, non-smokers. (Oh, notice that “thin.” Fat people die early too.)

Maybe I’ll buy a pack on the way home today….