Smoking Saves Money in Pensions and Long Term Health Care!

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You know the Phillip Morris executives had to be livid -- wondering what their Czech employees were doing.


http://www.msnbc.com/news/605375.asp

Philip Morris apologizes for report touting benefits of smokers’ deaths
By Gordon Fairclough -- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

July 26 — Trying to defuse a widening public-relations crisis, a top executive at Philip Morris Cos. apologized for a company-funded report calling cost savings from smokers’ early deaths one of the “positive effects” of cigarette consumption.

“WE UNDERSTAND that this was not only a terrible mistake, but that it was wrong,” Steven C. Parrish, a senior vice president, said in an interview Wednesday. “To say it’s totally inappropriate is an understatement.”

Philip Morris officials in the Czech Republic last month distributed an economic analysis concluding that cigarettes aren’t a drain on the country’s budget, in part because the government saves money on health care, pensions and housing when smokers die prematurely.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, last week wrote a letter to Philip Morris chief executive Geoffrey C. Bible after reading about the Czech report. Mr. Bible answered in a letter dated Tuesday, saying that the funding and release of the study “exhibited terrible judgment as well as a complete and unacceptable disregard of basic human values.”


“All of us at Philip Morris, no matter where we work, are extremely sorry for this,” he added.

The Czech study, commissioned by Philip Morris and produced by consulting firm Arthur D. Little International, weighs the costs of tobacco use, such as medical care for sick smokers, against benefits, including revenue from excise taxes on cigarettes. The study found that in 1999 the Czech government had a net gain of $147.1 million from smoking.


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