Kidding? No. The increase in lung cancer, specifically brochiogenic carcinoma, in women has paralleled the increase in smoking in the same cohort.
or the one about decreases in exposure to SHS for children yet a skyrocketing rate of asthma.........???
Asthma is more related to an over active immune system, rather than smoking, kids with pets have lower incidence of asthma, but that's beside the point here, which is paying for smoking related healthcare. SHS probably diffuses enough in the air to be little more than an anoyance, excepting places where everyone is smoking (ie. bars).
Look, it is obvious you do not like cigarette smoking and do not like to be around those that do, that's fine. However, imposing your own personal preferences upon those around you at gun point (use of government control) is not exactly the way to go about it
Who's pointing a gun? Not me. Smoke! Just don't ask me to pay for your healthcare. We all make choices and some of our choices have consequences - can't have your cake and eat it to - you can, however, enjoy your cigs, I'm not trying to stop you.
Gabz has repeatedly stated that she has private medical insurance and always has.
You repeatedly imply that she's asking you to pay for her healthcare.
Why do you do that?
"People who are unwilling to succumb to what the late Petr Skrabanek (a renegade Czech medic) described as 'Coercive Healthism' - those among us with 'bad habits' - are the new outcasts in this increasingly fearful and intolerant world. It is, in the words of the East London GP Michael Fitzpatrick, the Tyranny of Health which now surrounds us.
Michael Fitzpatrick's recent book called The Tyranny of Health: doctors and the regulation of lifestyle is one which I strongly urge everybody to read. He works in Hackney and is a man who is in daily contact with the sick, and sometimes with the dying. Increasingly, he is also in daily contact with the 'worried well', people who have been driven to fear the very world they live in by unfounded scares and inappropriate health promotion. And now he regularly encounters people who blame themselves for their own illnesses - those who have been persuaded that they are sick only because they have failed to lead the lifestyles which what he sees as an increasingly authoritarian government has prescribed for them.
His simple message is: "Doctors should stop trying to moralise their patients and concentrate on treating them", and he enlists the help of the microbiologist Renee Dubos to reinforce his point. Dubos commented in his book The Mirage of Health, written way back in 1960:
In the words of a wise physician, it is part of the doctor's function to make it possible for his patients to go on doing the pleasant things that are bad for them - smoking too much, eating and drinking too much - without killing themselves any sooner than is necessary.
And that, for Fitzpatrick, is the real job of the General Practitioner - not meeting 'lifestyle education' targets set by the state. Nor refusing to treat those who have allegedly brought ill health upon themselves. His job is that of the doctor, not the priest."
And
"A similar sentiment was also, and perhaps most famously, expressed by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. In his 'autobiography' he commented:
"There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokeable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get out of it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry."
It was Mark Twain, of course, who also urged us to be careful when reading health books. "You might", he warned "die of a misprint."
A hundred years on and we seem to have ignored all of these rather wise and liberal views, despite the clear evidence available to us of healthism's negative consequences at both individual and societal levels.
Nor am I, I have private healthcare also! But hey, by your claims, I'm going to die young so what do you have to worry about?
Consider all the Social Security Income I have created but won't be able to take advantage of......... Us smokers are actually your best friends......