Weblog
07/22/01 06:41 PM: Actually Shocked
I was genuinely shocked by something I read in the newspaper today. It’s been quite some time since that has happened. Hopefully I’m not as jaded at 16 as I appear to be and it’s just because I haven’t been reading the paper much lately. At any rate, the piece was about a report commissioned by Philip Morris. I was relieved once I realized that the author was only satirizing the report. But the report–at least as David Sarasohn of the Newhouse News Service describes it–is still unsettling. The report apparently urges the Czech government “not to forget the ‘indirect positive effects’ of smoking, i.e. how much money is saved as a result of people dying early. And there are no fuzzy numbers either; it’s all scientific. “We calculated pension savings by multiplying the old age pension and insurance paid from the state budget per year by the number of dead smokers of pension age in 1999,” the report states. “In this respect, it can be argued that the savings are even higher as the shortening of life means a reduction in the number of old patients, whose treatment is more costly than average.” So, early death is doubly beneficial. Less medical treatment is required overall, plus less of the expensive old people kind. According to Sarasohn, Philip Morris used this report to persuade the Czech Republic not to increase its tobacco tax, which is already considerably lower than average. I don’t smoke, but I guess I might have to take up the habit if that Social Security reform doesn’t pan out. It’s for the good of the country, after all.
