Im with you Pap ! - my Grandfather paid for the right to kill himself (painfully slowly I might add)-
I paid for the same right for about 10 yrs (2pk a day Lucky Strike filterless)-
Nothing good comes of it, never will.
Those lifestyle choices are burdening the collapsing system of health care as we know it - sure they have the right - I dont have to pick up the tab when they stiff the system when they are tapped out and destitute
Yes, all smokers end up living in dumpsters, penniless and begging you to help them - get real, will ya?
It's more likely that smokers will end up paying your long-term health care costs, for diapers and such, as you linger on into your dotage, pontificating and boring the hell out of anyone within hearing distance. After all smokers die younger, mostly so that we won't have to listen to the Nanny-Staters.
(You have been brain washed!)
I REPEAT:
The BIG LIE That Smoking is an Economic Burden To Society
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.
The burden of smokers longterm healthcare costs on our social safety nets is costing me money. That makes it my business.
That old crock has been debunked so many times it's due for an oil change. If that's the only reason you think what others do is any of your business, you'd better start looking for a new hobby.
"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.
"The lifetime health cost for a smoking man is $72,700 and $94,700 for a smoking woman. For nonsmokers, the cost is $83,400 for a man; $111,000 for a woman.
"If people stopped smoking today, there would be a savings in health care costs, but only in the short term. Eventually, smoking cessation would lead to increased health care costs." --New England Journal of Medicine,1997;337:1052-7.
We HAVE our own health insurance, thank you. You don't have to worry about paying for US!