Pianist Eubie Blake smoked for 85 years, dying at 96.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubie_Blake

Neither died of cancer, neither spent their old age with ‘debilitating diseases’. How could that be if smoking is the killer that some claim?

What percentage of people who smoke get lung cancer? Can you find that number? It’s *much* smaller than you might think.

Look into the peer-reviewed *scientific literature proving* that second-hand smoke causes 3000 deaths a year in the US. Be sure you’ve got plenty of time to find it.

Yes, smoking, for some people, has deleterious results. But the rabidity of the campaign against it — as opposed to deleterious killers like automobile pollution (post tetra-ethyl lead),and alcohol, which are not taxed to death like cigs, and which are “too big to fail” — demonstrates that anti-smokers are also irrational, bandwagon bigots.

The thing passionate people often miss is that ownership of a stock is not an endorsement of an industry.

I think that is somewhat disingenuous.
You are giving them your money and encouraging them to continue in their business.
It’s true that large companies have to invest in something, and that they are (probably?) legally obliged to put profits first, but I am not convinced that their choices have no effect.

Maybe this will remind us that we should expect investments made by large companies to be amoral.

I am certainly no finance expert and would agree that finance might be a bit offtopic for boingboing.
But this submission did inform me of something that hadn’t occurred to me.

Made me think that investment policy is something to be considered regarding state funding of healthcare vs. private insurance:
I am assuming that investment in tobacco firms encourages smoking. If insurance co.s have sound financial reasons for doing this, then here is a concrete example of them actually making health worse. They have no reason not to invest: they exist to make a profit. So any advantage offered by healthinsurance for profit needs to outweigh the fact that they seem to have an interest in tobacco firms making profits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_responsible_investing

How many people examine their own investments and expenditures to ensure that no person up the supply chain is harmed by economic activity? Got an Ipod? You’re promoting the use of coltan.

You invest in an asset negatively correlated with your own business. The idea is, if your own business is doing bad, your assets are probably doing well and can make up some of the downfall (and vice versa). Its a very basic investment principle meant to smooth out income streams.

Let’s say I own a bakery and use a lot of flour. If flour were to go up in price, it’d hurt my profits at the bakery. One thing I could do is invest in a flour company. That way, if flour does go up in price, my investment makes money, offsetting the damage that the high-priced flour does to my cake business. It in no way means I actually WANT the price of flour to increase.

In this case, there could be other nefarious reasons at play, but it isn’t inherently the case.

* Dead people don’t pay premiums.
* Cancer treatment is very expensive to insurers.

Health Plans are pushing smoking cessation programs as a benefit in a huge way, because healthy members are their goal – a good goal at that and not just financially.

Odds are the people investing are looking at numbers and paying no attention to the corporate mission. Not exactly a shocking possibility next to things like the City of Detroit investing in Krugerrands in the 70s and 80s.

There is no conspiracy here, just the usual nonsense where corporations aren’t paying attention to the whole picture.

Period.

Smoking is also the number one cause of laryngeal and throat cancers. I can haz laryngectomy? And mouth and tongue cancers. Google glossectomy. It’s also the number one cause of bladder cancer. Yes, your bladder. That piss-holding organ two feet away from your mouth. Smoking is also the number one cause of COPD, the lung disease formerly known as emphysema. Heart disease? Guess one of the major culprits. Let’s not even get into wrinkles and impotence.

And you know what else? No matter what’s wrong with you, smoking will keep you from getting better because it deprives you of oxygen. You might not be allowed to have necessary surgery because the anesthesiologist won’t pass you and your blackened lungs to go into the OR. Smoking is less dangerous than putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger, but not much.

Good question. But in the context of tobacco use’s impact on health insurance costs, cancer of the lung, mouth, esophagus, stomach, cervix, kidney and pancreas should be considered. As well as non-cancer illnesses like emphysema and cardiovascular diseases.

I use tobacco daily. I’m using right now, in fact. But I’m not going to delude myself into thinking the risks I take are dismissively negligible.

If I were an oil company I would invest in solar, and vice versa.

The *numbers* are actually pretty *bad*.

“Smoking cost the United States over $193 billion in 2004, including $97 billion in lost productivity and $96 billion in direct health care expenditures…” That would cover a freaking lot of unfunded health care, even after you wrote off the lost taxes and let the employers keep the “found” $97B of production.

“Smoking-related diseases claim an estimated 438,000 American lives each year, including those affected indirectly, such as babies born prematurely due to prenatal maternal smoking and victims of ‘secondhand’ exposure to tobacco’s carcinogens.” FYI, that’s roughly 10 times the number killed on U.S. highways annually. That’s 9/11, 146 times, every year.

Lung cancer would fall out of the top ten cancers(currently it’s #1 in fatalities), if there were no smoking. “Smoking is directly responsible for approximately 90 percent of lung cancer deaths and approximately 80-90 percent of COPD (emphysema and chronic bronchitis) deaths.”

“About 8.6 million people in the U.S. have at least one serious illness caused by smoking. That means that for every person who dies of a smoking-related disease, there are 20 more people who suffer from at least one serious illness associated with smoking.”

The American Cancer Institute says about 160,000 Americans will die of lung cancer this year. The 144,000 of those deaths attributable to smoking would presumably die of something else, after a longer, better life.

(Source for the other 4 is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, via the American Lung Assoc. website. Not very *hard* to *find*.)

Nobody dies because someone buys tobacco stock. That’s not an issue. Issue: Why should I believe a company “cares” about wellness when it invests in a product that kills? And why should we let moral values like that anywhere near anyone’s health?

If Health Insurance companies wanted some sinister way to save cash, they would start investing in pink hello kitty assault rifles for kids.

Yes. I worked in health care for 20 years. There’s a massive misconception about the healthcare industry. The misconception is that patients are the customers. They’re not. Insurance companies are the customers. The people who pay you are your customers.

If you own a restaurant, your customers are the people who come in, eat and leave money on the table. Your customers are not the businesses that pay salaries to your diners. Patients pay for insurance. Insurance pays for healthcare.

Every patient care decision that we ever made in 20 years was based on insurance contracts: fee for service vs. Diagnosis Relating Grouping vs. capitation. Every healthcare service that you receive is molded by insurance company policies. And it doesn’t matter if you pay cash, the system treats you like cattle anyway.

Yes. I worked in health care for 20 years. There’s a massive misconception about the healthcare industry. The misconception is that patients are the customers. They’re not. Insurance companies are the customers. The people who pay you are your customers.

Which is exactly why the solution to the healthcare problem in the USA is not more insurance but less. We need most healthcare to be so affordable that most of us can pay out of pocket — just as we do for food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities.

According to David Gratzer, M.D.:

How do you understand health policy? Two dates: October 26, 1943, and December 1, 1942.

October 26, 1943: possibly the most important day in health policy in America. The Supreme Court does not issue a ruling; Congress does not pass any legislation; FDR does not even give a rous ing speech. The IRS rules for the first time that employers can provide health insurance and pay the premiums in pre-tax dollars. That eventually gets codified in 1954.

How did this come about? Wage and price controls during the Second World War. Everyone knows the story about price controls. Perhaps some of the older members of this group have lived through it; perhaps you simply heard stories from your aunt or grandmother talking about rationing butter and so on. Everyone remembers the price controls, which were quickly abolished; few remember the consequences of wage controls. Employers all of a sudden needed to attract employees but couldn’t offer better wages. So they started to offer benefits, and in particular, they offered health insurance, something employers really hadn’t done before the Second World War; and what was a fringe benefit initially became the mainstay of private insurance for Americans after October 26, 1943. All of a sudden you could entice employees with health insurance.

Why did that make sense from an employer’s point of view? Wage controls. Now you could offer them a benefit in pre-tax dollars; you got around wage controls. But for employees, it was also a good deal. Think about it: If your boss offers you $1,000 in bonus, how much are you really going to take home? Depending on what the marginal tax rate is, depending on your bracket, you might only take home $500. But he offers you $1,000 worth of health insurance, and you could potentially take home $1,000 worth of benefits. That is why, well into the 1970s and ’80s, employers offered health insurance and lots of it; why sunglasses, marital counseling, hair transplants were all at one point in time covered by health insurance. All of these things are important, but they aren’t really insurance as we understand it in other aspects of the economy.

but in a capitalistic system you only win if somebody else loses. Is this really so hard to understand?

Actually, that’s a classic fallacy. It assumes that economic systems are zero-sum.

Trade, absent of force or fraud, is actually both-benefit (i.e. mutually beneficial), or else it would not occur (i.e. both parties would not agree to the trade).

So wealth is capable of both being created and destroyed. Hence, it’s possible to “grow the pie” rather than merely redistribute the slices of an existing pie.

I smoked for 30 years. Pretty fair chance I will find it a stupid way to die, too.

#2, the insurance industry makes its money by INVESTING that portion of our premiums which is not needed today to pay claims and expenses. There’s little money in reviewing and processing claims (well, denying claims helps). Premiums are high when the population is unhealthy, because claims are high. Conversely, the end result of wellness programs is better health — and reduced premiums, because of reduced claim costs. But if there’s less income from premiums, there’s less to invest, and less profit, and that’s where the money comes from. So the insurance industry has no good business reason to change the model. We can either change drivers … or change the driver’s mind … or just keep going. So what’s it gonna be?

BTW, health plans can push smoking cessation all they want, here in the U.S. There are still magnificent sums to be made from tobacco sold in other countries. And please note that Tobacco IS turning a profit, despite everything.

Can someone explain the moral distinction between investing in tobacco, and investing in heroin or meth? All are addictive, lethal, and highly profitable. Oh, and all of them have killed cool artists.

And mothers.

Living in Massachusetts, my state taxes support mandatory health insurance through these providers. I’m forced to indirectly support companies making products that cause people to get sick and die under the guise of providing health care to people who couldn’t normally afford it.

And this is a model for healthcare reform at the national level.

Some additional excerpts from the New England Journal of Medicine letter to the editor which the Consumerist article is citing, from Harvard Science:

“Although investing in tobacco while selling life or health insurance may seem self-defeating,” wrote the authors, “insurance firms have figured out ways to profit from both. Insurers exclude smokers from coverage or, more commonly, charge them higher premiums. Insurers profit – and smokers lose – twice over.”

The same researchers, all of whom are affiliated with Physicians for a National Health Program, first published data about the “tobacco-insurance company connection” in 1995 in the medical journal Lancet. They argue that because private, for-profit insurers have repeatedly put their own financial gain over the public’s health, people in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom should be wary about insurance firms’ participation in care.

They added, “These data raise a red flag about the prospects of opening up vast new markets for private insurers at public expense, as has happened in our state of Massachusetts, whose recent health care reform is often cited as a model for national reform.”

That’s just not true. The IPO is not the only time a company can sell it’s stock. Hence the name “initial”.

Say you’ve issued 1 million shares. Your share price is now about $100. You wanted to raise some money. You decided to issue 1 million more shares. How much can you charge for those shares? How much can you raise?

Now, let’s say another company has issued 1 million shares. But it’s share price is now about $0.10. It wants to raise $100 million. So it issues 1 billion new shares at $0.10 each. Can it find buyers for those shares?

Secondly, when lots of people invest their money in an industry, it would drive up the share prices. Would this not encourage more people to join this industry, forming new companies? Would those new companies find it easier to get investors?

Is it not reasonable to expect the converse to be true as well? If everyone pulls their money out of an industry, their share prices would plummet. You cannot invest your money in an industry that goes against your own moral values, and then say you’re not responsible for it.

“If I don’t put in my money somebody else will.” That excuse doesn’t work. If you don’t believe me, go invest in those Somali pirates. See if the cops don’t come knocking on your door.

I wonder if insurers make more money from smokers as opposed to non smokers?
Anyone in the know on this?
More treatment needed for smokers. But higher premiums and presumably more opportunity to find technicalities and avoiding paying out.

Please give some good examples of wealth creation that does not consume an equivalent amount of resources.