Tobacco and "Health" Insurance: Profiting on both sides.

by anderson

�What we should be doing is banning tobacco. Nobody up here has the courage to do that."
-- Senator Tom Coburn (R-Ok)

Generally considered "one of the staunchest free market conservatives in the Senate," Coburn is also a physician, which appears to be governing his views regarding tobacco.

Either that, or Coburn is concerned about Oklahoma's flat-lining prison population and underhandedly seeks to further boost his state's share of the prison-industrial complex with new and evermore draconian laws.  Indeed, a War on Tobacco would surely balloon a prison population that has been ballooning for thirty years under the War on Drugs.  There is neither vice nor virtue that America's political class does not view as potentially punishable in their unending, penurious stretch to demonstrate their resolve in being tough on crime.  If current crimes are insufficient in generating profitable prisoner population growth, new ones will spring forth.

Prison-industrial complex or not, there may be greater forces that will govern congressional direction regarding tobacco, something that will surely overwhelm even Coburn's concerns.

Major U.S., Canadian and British life and health insurance companies have billions of dollars invested in tobacco companies, says a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Wesley Boyd, the study's lead author, found that at least $4.4 billion US in insurance company funds are invested in companies whose affiliates produce cigarettes, cigars and chewing tobacco.

"Despite calls upon the insurance industry to get out of the tobacco business by physicians and others, insurers continue to put their profits above people's health," said Boyd, a faculty member of Harvard Medical School.

"It's clear their top priority is making money, not safeguarding people's well-being," he wrote.

[...]
"Although investing in tobacco while selling life or health insurance may seem self-defeating, insurance firms have figured out ways to profit from both," Boyd wrote.

Actually, the strategy looks perfectly sound: what better way to make billions in the health insurance business? Provide insurance to tobacco addicts at extremely high rates, curl into the usual posture of denying claims, turn the money around into investments in Big Tobacco, which then funds the cycle of addiction for another round of poor-health profit.

That these same companies* are the ones that Congress and the Obama administration are leaving in place in the ridiculously named "health care reform" effort is bad enough.  The evidence that the insurance companies are profiting, not only from illness and addiction, but from their investments in those very companies providing illness and addiction is something that should indicate to everyone that when corporations profit from sickness, the public will never be served.

Update: Time magazine has a fascinating collection of vintage tobacco ads, showing doctors touting the marvelous benefits of smoking, which is where I got that baby picture.  Yes, Big Tobacco used babies to sell cigarettes.  

* Companies named in the study include Prudential Financial, Prudential Plc, Sun Life Financial, Northwestern Mutual, Massachusetts Mutual Life, and Standard Life Plc.