I believe e-cigarettes are not taxed like cigarettes, so smoking e-cigarettes will not help the SCHIP program. They are probably a safer way to get your nicotine, as you point out, since no combustion takes place. Nicotine isn't carcinogenic, but according to Philip Morris documents, nicotine apparently lowers people's threshold to [[Nicotine and ventricular fibrillation|ventricular fibrillation]], which can lead to sudden cardiac arrest.
Anne Landman
Maude, Wenona Hauter, the Executive Director of Food and Water Watch, and I needed to use the bathrooms at the World Water Forum and discovered that there were separate bathrooms for the VIPs which we were not allowed to use. When we finally made our way to the ordinary people's bathrooms, we discovered there was no running water, so the toilets wouldn't flush and we couldn't wash our hands.
Smokers of typical cigarettes are not just "dirty" and "rude" convenient pools of regressive tax revenues, they are human beings...Guinea Pigs who are unwittingly, without Informed Consent, exposed to non-tobacco things like pesticide residues galore, high levels of dioxin from chlorine pesticides and bleached paper, radiation from the still "legal" use of certain phosphate fertilizers, added burn-accelerants, added addiction-enhancing substances, and any of over 1400 (!) untested, often toxic and carcinogenic non-tobacco additives. That any number of low-end brands may contain not a shred of tobacco but, instead, "tobacco substitute material" made from all sorts of industrial waste cellulose (from which evil Tobacco Smoke" is impossible), compounds the government-sanctioned fraud.
Taxes...not to mention significant penalties and compensatory damages...ought be applied not to the victims but to the suppliers of all those adulterants, to cigarette makers who assembled it all and then fraudulently and absurdly called the concoctions "tobacco", and to complicit public officials who've gone criminally AWOL from their duties to protect the public from exactly such threats, frauds, and harms.
If Mokhiber's Single Payer Action group finally opens up the Pandora's Box regarding private insurers' vast holdings in most of the worst health-damaging firms on Wall Street, including even top cigarette manufacturers, then we will know that we have a Single Payer activist group that is not doing As-Little-As-Possible....as so many others seem to be doing.
As a visit to public documents at the Security & Exchange Commission (SEC) shows anyone who cares to look, top health insurers also have multi-million dollar investments (using what was our health care money) in Big Coal, top oil producers, pesticides, GE "food", chlorine interests galore, and top "war" contractors.
Insurers invest also in pharmaceuticals, thus setting up motive and fiduciary duty to favor investment properties' drugs over others that may be safer, cheaper and more effective...and to overlook health problems with the property's drugs.
The idea that Private Insurance is Bad for Our Health (not just our finances) has not been put into the discussion. This is a clue to what may be a dark, almost (not quite) unimaginable situation, that some or many Single Payer groups are somehow set up to fail...to create the illusion that "something is being done"---as long as it's ineffective in removing private insurers from our public health system.
that speaks volumes about the Forum's agenda:
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