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Saturday, February 9, 2008

Smokers: lower health costs and larger taxes

It's often believed that smokers pay huge direct taxes because we cost more to the state in terms of health care. Well, this has been now proven to be completely false: in fact smokers are a lot cheaper because we live less and develope less frequently the really costly old age diseases like Alzheimer or Parkinson (among others).

A new Dutch research paper shows clearly that smokers are like 20% cheaper to the state in terms of health care than the average healthy person. The paper also studies obesity costs and finds obese people are also cheaper than average in terms of health care, but less so than smokers anyhow.

Being healthy is expensive in terms of health care because you simply live longer and therefore ae more likely to incur in what is the real burden of health care by much: old age.

When are we smokers to organize ourselves and fight back against that puritanic nuisance and at least gain the right not pay more than the rest.

After all it's not even good for the economy, because we don't buy less tobacco and all that money is retrieved from the market and wasted probably in bureaucracy or weaponry (not even in health care after all).

4 comments:

Astrolog Tanja said...

I heard some story that all about on Smoking and Health is marketing of some Insurance companies and similar administrations against Tobacco industry, that is all about money.

I don’t believe in administration and statistic, according to statistic it is possible to drawn in water of the river with average deep of 20 cubic centimeters. :-)

I have examples in my neighborhood, 82-year-old lady, full time smoker and with excellent health, and some guy with cancer in 35, no-smoker.

In addition, macrobiotic people don't believe that smoking is bad for you. They have serious researching about this topic.

And new 20th century trend with fitness and bodybuilding…lol, have you ever seen the tiger doing aerobic? Moreover, he is in excellent condition, he just listen his nature and behaves naturally.

The conclusion – it’s all about the governments and money.

Maju said...

I would not go so far as claiming that smoking is not bad for the respiratory system: I'm pretty sure that it's not designed for that in any case. But it's obvious to me that sedentarism increases its damage in any case, as the overall health is lowered and the ventilaton effort is much lower. Also active smokers surely smoke less anyhow.

In any case, what I'm most concerned about is that they scam us with the pretext of health. I don't mind so much the abusive "advices" printed on the the packets or the restrictions to smoke in some places, what really upsets me is to be paying like 90% taxes on a daily product just because some puritans have decided to make a scapegoat out of us.

Astrolog Tanja said...

I agree with you, lot of things upset us, but think about to do something about it, if it is possible of course.

Maju said...

I decided to blog about it. Surely it's not enough but it's something.