Its always a hoot listening to you libbies rant and retch about "big government" yet don't realize that it is *I* (the non-smoker) who have to foot YOUR effin health bills 40 years down the line!!!
Retch!!!
I think Calico Cat answered you very well, however, I will alert the Puff List to let them see what one of our "own kind" ie: Conservative, has to say about us.
To answer your rant about paying for OUR health care:
Smokers are not a financial burden as been implied: Smoking-related healthcare costs are a pittance to overall healthcare costs (8% in my state of Maine). If every smoker quit, healthcare costs would go down only temporarily and then rise above the amount you are complaining about now, because nonsmokers get sick too and for more years. Smokers more than make up for their extra cost by dying (their choice-not yours) sooner; collecting less social security and pensions, and less time in nursing homes. The state tax on cigarettes is all gravy. This is all backed up by facts.
"After the Clinton administration proposed a fairly substantial increase in the cigarette tax as a way of funding health care reform, my colleague Dennis Zimmerman and I wrote a paper entitled "Cigarette Taxes to Fund Health Care Reform and Economic Analysis." (CRS, Library of Congress, #94214 E ) The part of the paper I'd like to talk about is the justifications for increasing the cigarette tax. "I know an economist, so I start with the presumptions that people have subjective preferences about what they like to do and how they spend their money and that, in general, we want to allow people to enjoy their lifetime resources in accord with those preferences. We would intervene in those decisions only under certain kinds of circumstances that we try to delineate and measure. "When you buy a pack of cigarettes, you pay the price of the cigarettes. You also assume some implicit costs that you know about if you are aware of the health effects of smoking. But there might be another part of the cost that you don't pay, the cost that smokers impose on other people. That is the kind of cost that we were trying to examine. When we looked at the study done by health economist Ray Manning and several associates (funded by the RAND Corporation) we found that the spillover effect per pack of cigarettes was 33 cents. At the time (1994), the sum of federal, state, and local cigarette taxes was about 50 cents per pack. So the cigarette tax was already higher than the spillover cost."--Jane Gravelle, economist, Congressional Research Service.
It would appear from your profile that you are a conservative. You claim that you will have to pay for smokers' medical bills. As a conservative, what do you think is the proper solution to this problem?
A. Ending the socialist and immoral practice of taxpayer subsidized healthcare, so you won't have to cover the smokers' bills.
or
B. Pushing for more socialism and big government in the form of prohibiting smoking on private property?
Not very observant are you, it has long ago been agreed by the best, that smokers pay for their own illnesses and then some.