JACKSON - In New York City, a pack of Lucky Strikes will cost you seven bucks, fifty, in case you're going to be in the Big Apple and feel you've just got to get some smokes.
The state of New York slaps a $1.50 tax on tobacco and recently the City of New York has tacked on its own $1.50 tax. All of it to help fund health care related to smoking.
That bit of research about smokes in NYC is not my own. Fortunately, despite the business I'm in, I've never smoked. Or chewed for that matter.
But someone who makes it his business to know about such things is Sean A.C. Courtney, program manager of the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program. He cites New York as a dramatic example of what many states around the country are doing to not only discourage tobacco use, but make smokers help pay for the damage to public health from the product.
Mississippi, at 18 cents per pack on cigarettes, has one of the lowest tobacco taxes in the nation. We're 40th, in fact.
We last raised our tobacco tax in 1985. Since then 44 other states have increased their tax on cigarettes.
With budget woes plaguing most states, and Medicaid funding a leading problem around the country, smokers have become the target of choice of states to raise more revenue.
Nine states lately, for a total of 14 in 2002, have raised their tobacco excise tax. Recent increases have been 49 cents in Vermont, 46 cents in Kansas, 40 cents in Indiana, 12 cents in Louisiana, and a whopping 70 cents in New Jersey.
But when the Governor's Healthcare Commission recently released its recommendations for strengthening Mississippi's Medicaid program and called for raising the cigarette tax to 50 cents per pack, state lawmakers ran for cover.
One state senator groused that a cigarette tax hike would "hurt the poor people." My, oh my, better to let the "poor guy" hurt himself and just keep on puffing as before. We can fill up the cemeteries more quickly that way.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's latest report on tobacco use in Mississippi projects that 48,835 Mississippi youth will die prematurely from their smoking.
The CDC ranked Mississippi 46th worst in the nation in average annual deaths related to smoking in the 1990-1994 period and said smoking shortened the life expectancy of Mississippians on an average of 14.5 years.
The National Youth Tobacco Survey for 2000 showed cigarette smoking among Mississippi youth was significantly higher than the national average. In grades 6-8, the survey showed 17.8 percent of young people were smoking as opposed to 11 percent nationally. In grades 9-12, 30.5 of students were smoking compared to 28 percent nationally.
Courtney, the program manager of the Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, a nonprofit public interest group, contends that the "best remedy" to curb youth smoking here, and at the same time provide adequate funding for the state's health care delivery system, is to increase the cigarette tax.
"Medicaid is the largest delivery system in this state and obviously from all the information available, it is plagued with instability," Courtney declared.
"The refrain we hear from the state Capitol indicates that lawmakers will allow cuts to be made in eligibility, services or reimbursement under the Medicaid program rather than explore ways of providing revenue to adequately fund the program," he added.
Annually, he said, health care costs directly caused by smoking totals $561 million. Of that, $206 million is paid by Medicaid.
Raising the cigarette tax to 50 cents a pack, Courtney said, "is estimated to produce an additional $124.9 million, which would ultimately benefit the state by $344.1 million in long-term health savings."
The Mississippi Health Advocacy Program, which is championing the tobacco tax increase to support Medicaid, is no bunch of starry-eyed idealists who just popped up on the screen.
Actually, there's a poignant story behind MHAP and how it first came into being. The Catholic Sisters of Mercy, who had been tending the sick in Vicksburg since the 1860s, decided in 1990 to sell their Vicksburg hospital and devote most of the proceeds for assessment of health needs of the poor in Mississippi.
Through a generous grant from the Sisters of Mercy Health System, MHAP was created in 1992 to seek basic health care for those whose health is threatened by poverty, racism, malnutrition or violence.
MHAP was in the forefront of urging state lawmakers in 1999 to provide matching funds from the state's settlement in the lawsuit against the tobacco industry in order for the state to participate in "CHIP," the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Now some 55,000 to 60,000 poor children in Mississippi who formerly had no health insurance protection are enrolled under CHIP.
Courtney says MHAP is mounting a broad-based statewide coalition to promote increasing the tobacco excise tax for funding public health delivery systems while at the same time reducing the rate of smoking.
Rarely over the years has any major citizen-based public policy initiative met with much success in the Mississippi Legislature. Maybe lawmakers will be smoked out to support this one.
