U.S. Chamber Fights Smoking Laws While Hospitals and Insurers Sit on Its Board

New York Times ^ | July 1, 2015 | By Danny Hakim

[Brad from Tennessee]

Anthem, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, wants its members to stop smoking.

It reimburses those who enroll in smoking-cessation programs or who buy products, like nicotine patches, intended to help people quit. It has even offered to arrange sessions with a coach who talks smokers through the process of quitting.

“Smoking is an unhealthy habit,” the insurer proclaimed in one of its publications. “It’s a smart business decision to urge your employees to quit smoking.”

But Anthem’s executive vice president, Wayne S. DeVeydt, serves on the board of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is engaged in a worldwide campaign to block antismoking laws. These include taxes on cigarettes in the Philippines, graphic health warnings on cigarette packs in Jamaica and Nepal, a plan to prohibit the display of cigarettes by retailers in Uruguay and restrictions on smoking in public spaces in Moldova.

The chamber’s global opposition to antismoking measures, reported by The New York Times this week, poses a challenge for many of the members of the organization, particularly hospitals and health insurers. Four executives of leading health care organizations, including Mr. DeVeydt, are members of the chamber’s board. The other three executives come from the Health Care Service Corporation, an insurer based in Chicago, the Steward Health Care System of Boston and the Indiana University Health system. . .

[lee martell]

A heavy case of Busy-Body-Itis. AKA The Bloomberg syndrome.

[stanne]

I don’t mean to be rude not unladylike. Really. This is incest

It is not capitalism, which, in its prime, is full of healthy family moral input, namely, a wife’s oversight and subsequently a daughter’s. A soon will, by good upbringinging, be able willing and obliged to oversee

These creepy people have nothing but rationalization on the mind. No sense of how their investors, to whom tge portend allegiance, despise the dirty money, but have no control and realize it

The answer is to not get involved in people’s smoking. To drop people who have smoking related illnesses as risk and who choose to take that risk

Just duh

And for corporations to get out of not only ruining our lives but also taking over our country

[KoRn]

/mark

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Finally come good news regarding the Chamber of Crony Capitalists.

[Reno89519]

Idiiots. We should simply ban cigarettes. Figures people simultaneously profiteering on both sides. Wonder if they smoke (hope they do and suffer the consequences). I’ve got a father now in stage 4 and still smoking.

[KoRn]

They started doing this where I *USED* to work.

This is a slippery slope. It begins with smoking, and will continue until they rule over every aspect of our lives.