Hopefully this is a first step towards a full tobacco ban!
F**k no.
Nobody thinks that tobacco is safe or healthy, and if people want to use it in spite of knowing all the negative effects, that's on them and the Government should allow them to do so.
Wrong. Tobacco is one of the key drivers of Medicare costs. Anybody who smokes is selfishly freeloading on the government dole.
Well, the average cigarette tax is $1.70/pack (according to Google), so a smoker who smokes a pack a day for 50 years pays around $30,000 in cigarette taxes. That's ... less than the cost of a single chemotherapy treatment. Not all smokers get cancer (though it is the #1 cause of most types of cancer, not just lung), but there are dozens of other common expensive diseases directly caused by it.
Granted, some smokers will pay more than that over their lives if they smoke more than a pack per day, but at the same time a lot of smokers don't smoke that many packs, or for that many years. And that tax money is going to the states, not Medicare anyway.
In a <65 population, smokers collectively only cost around 5% - 10% higher per person than nonsmokers. (
cite). Almost the entire brunt of increased costs goes onto the Medicare population. Also, private insurers can charge smokers more premium to account for this, while Medicare does not.
To your final sentence, dying at 67 after a long expensive disease is almost certainly a higher expense to Medicare than staying on Medicare until 87 without ever having one. Medical costs are outrageously expensive, even when Medicare pays doctors a good bit less than private insurers do for the same services.
edit-also, aren't fatties an even worse driver for Medicare costs? or at least very comparable?
I don't know. It's illegal for health insurance to vary rates by weight these days, so there may not even be any up-to-date studies on that. It wouldn't surprise me if it were true, but it's not really relevant to this thread.
