[TC Rider]

It effects everyone every year when health insurance premiums are determined and then passed on to all of us. In essence, those of us who do not smoke are subsidizing the health care costs of those who litter the CVICU and cardiac cath labs of this country not to mention the oncology wards.

What about those of us who don't eat greasy cheeseburgers? Or those that don't have 18 year old kids wrapping their cars around trees. Or those of us who aren't having promiscuous sex with anything that moves? Who's paying their bills?

It's been proven that cigarette smokers are less of a burden on the health care system. They live fast and die young. While the non-smokers go on to live till 95 with every conceivable geriatric disease.

Leave me and my cigars alone.

[Drango]

Or those of us who aren't having promiscuous sex with anything that moves?

Bummer....

November 6, 1998

"60 Minutes" To Broadcast Report On Impotence Among Smokers

CBS News will report on the November 8 edition of "60 Minutes" that a number of researchers have found that male smokers have significantly higher rates of impotence than nonsmokers. Male smokers are about twice as likely as nonsmokers to suffer from impotence according to research conducted by the New England Research Institute and the Centers for Disease Control.

"There is absolutely no question about it. It causes it very commonly," Dr. Cully Carson, chairman of the Urology Department at the University of North Carolina, told CBS.

Dr. Randolph Smoak, chairman of the American Medical Association, who also agrees on the link between smoking and impotence, said, "Smoking does and can cause impotence. We have not paid attention to impotence because it didn't kill people, but it severely incapacitated men prematurely."

Source: "Add Impotence To The List Of Smokers' Ills," REUTERS, November 5, 1998.