DOROTHY RICE'S PSYCHOPATHIC LIES ABOUT SMOKERS' MEDICAID COSTS

3-10-98

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: Taxpayers, smokers and nonsmokers alike, had to come up with $12.9 billion to cover smoking-related Medicaid costs just five years ago, according a new nationwide report.

"Although the tobacco industry often argues that smoking cigarettes is a matter of individual choice, these estimates show that this harmful product imposes significant economic burdens on state taxpayers, who have no choice but to bear them," concludes the report, which relies on a model used by states suing the industry....

"I want to alert people to the high costs of smoking and the enormous amount that the Medicaid program has spent," said Dorothy Rice, professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-author. [From AP]

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: Separately, a new study reports that smoking costs Medicaid, the joint state-federal U.S. health program for the poor, $12.9 billion a year.

Over 25 years -- the period covered by a $368.5 billion settlement between states and tobacco companies -- the costs would have totaled at least $322 billion, Dorothy Rice, a University of California expert who helped lead the study, said.

Rice said this meant the settlement was far too low and she urged Congress, which has to approve it, to press for more money.

"If you multiply the annual total cost for all the states just for Medicaid by 25 you get very close to the $368 billion in the proposed global settlement, which simply means there's no room for any of the other federal programs and private health insurers that have paid out just as the Medicaid program has for the high costs of the adverse effects of smoking," she said in a telephone interview. [From Reuters]

COMMENTS: These claims by Dorothy Rice that smokers are an economic burden to the taxpayers in general, and Medicaid in particular, are based on such outrageously fraudulent methodology, that they qualify as deliberate, psychopathic lying.

In the real world, persons saved from so-called smoking deaths have health costs from continuing to live that they would not have had if they had died. They also have costs when they invariably die a few years later from either the same or another cause.

Rice's vaunted economic model is fraudulent, because it pretends that those costs do not exist. She pretends that, for economic purposes, the lives saved from smoking deaths simply disappear into thin air.

For example, most of the lives "saved" from lung cancer will go on to perish from either heart disease, or other forms of cancer. Rice does not calculate how much these alternative deaths cost, and compare them with the cost of deaths from lung cancer. She simply ignores them.

Most of the lives "saved" from so-called smoking related heart disease would merely die of heart disease anyway, but a few years later. Rice pretends that these costs of dying of heart disease a few years later do not exist, either.

If people live longer, there will be more old people with dementia, the leading cause of nursing home costs. Thus, nursing home costs would increase. These nursing home costs, mainly spent on non-smokers, are about 43% of Medicaid costs in an average state such as Wisconsin.

But Rice pretends that there are no savings in Medicaid nursing home costs due to smokers' earlier deaths. By some mystical manner of unexplained means, the elderly population would burgeon, but NONE of them would ever require a nursing home. Nor would they ever get ill or die.

The costs that she doesn't count dwarf smoking costs. Only by this deception can she pretend that non-smokers are subsidizing smokers, when it is really smokers who are paying tens of billions of extra dollars to subsidize non-smokers.

This same fraud is committed in Rice's previous work, the Centers for Disease Control's SAMMEC, and by the Office of Technology Assessment. This so-called "new study" is really just another SAMMEC, with different data plugged in.

The methodological frauds of the anti-smokers' smoking cost claims have been exposed numerous times. E.g., Manning et al, JAMA 1989;261:1604-1609; Raynauld & Vidal, Canadian Public Policy 1992;18:300-317; the 1994 Congress Research Service Report, "Cigarette taxes to fund health care reform"; Berendregt et al, New England Journal of Medicine 1997;337:1052-1057; and Viscusi, The Brookings Review 1998;16:14-19.

The media, including the Associated Press and Reuters, have been duly, and repeatedly, informed of these debunking studies, and they have obstinately ignored them. Not once in the whole course of the Medicaid lawsuits have the media ever reported truthfully that smokers' health costs are not an economic burden, and the attorneys generals' claims are false. The media have likewise covered up the fraudulent methodology of the anti-smokers' smoking cost claims.

The media have deliberately spread the libel that smokers are an economic burden, for the express purpose of inciting their puppet state attorneys general to falsely claim economic damages against the tobacco industry, when their states have economically benefited from smoking, REGARDLESS OF TAXES; to wrongfully cause economic damage to smokers and deprive us of our liberties.

This is conspiracy, fraud, racketeering, and corruption, unprecedented in the history of this Republic. The anti-smokers and their accomplices must be prosecuted and punished, including paying restitution and damages to smokers for the many billions of dollars that their lies have cost us.

Counterpoint by

Carol Thompson
Smokers' Rights Action Group
P.O. Box 259575
Madison, WI 53725-9575
Phone: 608-249-4568

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