Written By: Gerald Prante
Published In: Budget & Tax News
Publication Date: January 1, 2007
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

Some economists note that any health care cost imposed on society by smokeless tobacco or any other product is technically a transfer that has been created by government through a quasi-socialized health care system.

In addition, they note, while it is commonly assumed that individuals' unhealthful habits must necessarily impose health care costs on society, this is not at all the case. A field of economics known as social cost accounting attempts to discern the aggregate fiscal effects of different types of behavior, and its findings are often counterintuitive.

Smoking, for example, has been found not to impose health care costs on nonsmokers. To the contrary, current federal, state, and local fiscal regimes have been found to transfer tens of billions of dollars from smokers to nonsmokers.

See, for example, Patrick Fleenor, "Who Bears the Ancillary Cost of Tobacco Use?" Tax Foundation Background Paper, No. 36 (January 2001), available online at http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/121.html.