pouches

Health and life insurance policies should accept the science on nicotine

Washington, D.C. – Today the Consumer Choice Center launched its policy primer offering simple reforms to provide Americans with more competitive, reasonable, and accurate insurance rates. The result of reform would be more choice and lower costs for consumers in the insurance market. 

The primer, Fixing What’s Broken: Practical Consumer-Friendly Insurance Reforms to Save Money, focuses on two pressing issues for American consumers. First, it analyzes how insurance providers can adapt to the emerging scientific reality of tobacco harm reduction and consumer trends toward less harmful nicotine alternatives to smoking. Second, this primer explains different models for structuring consumer auto insurance and suggests how costly legal battles can be minimized, in turn lowering costs and premiums.

Elizabeth Hicks, US Affairs Analyst at the Consumer Choice Center, commented on the health & life insurance policy recommendations, saying, Anyone who’s ever applied for health or life insurance has had to answer if they use nicotine, and that inevitably leads to higher premiums. But those who use less harmful non-combustible nicotine products such as vaping or pouches don’t face nearly the same risk. Why should they pay the same high premiums as smokers?” 

By discerning the significant differences between traditional tobacco products and non-combustible nicotine alternatives for health and long-term medical costs, insurers and consumers together stand to save millions.

“The health insurance industry, as well as policymakers, should want smokers to cease smoking or switch to less harmful alternatives. Insurance plans are long overdue for accurately calculating risk around nicotine-use and restructuring consumer’s rates,” added Hicks.

Guided by state insurance commissioners, actuarial calculations at insurance firms should be recalibrated to reflect the current scientific reality on tobacco harm reduction, giving smokers an immediate financial incentive to make the switch to less harmful products. It makes no sense to penalize nicotine users who do not use combustible products.

This change would not only reflect scientific consensus, but also promote a better economic calculation on future costs and risk profiles in the healthcare space. It would give more options to insurance firms and spur them to compete for potential customers,” concluded Hicks. 

The policy primer can be read in full HERE.

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The Consumer Choice Center is an independent, nonpartisan consumer advocacy group championing the benefits of freedom of choice, innovation, and abundance in everyday life for consumers in over 100 countries. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Washington, Brussels, Ottawa, Brasilia, London, and Geneva. Find out more at www.consumerchoicecenter.org

Checking in on Michael Bloomberg’s multi-million dollar global crusade against harm reduction

For years, we’ve covered the extent of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s multi-million dollar campaigns to try to shape the lives of ordinary consumers.

What began as an erstwhile nanny state campaign on Big Gulps in New York City has ballooned into a massively funded operation that uses grants and NGO funding on many tobacco issues, mostly on outlawing nicotine alternatives like vaping products.

In 2019, Bloomberg pledged $160 million to get US states and localities to ban flavored vaping products, mostly funneled to anti-tobacco groups who’ve pivoted from “stop smoking” campaigns to “stop consuming nicotine in all forms.”

Those efforts quickly scaled to the level of the World Health Organization, including funding US anti-tobacco groups in the millions to even go so far to completely outlaw nicotine alternatives in developing countries across Latin America, Asia, and more. While nations on these continents typically have larger smoking populations than in the US and Europe, they have thus far been deprived of the life-saving nicotine alternatives that would serve as a less harmful switch away from smoking.

In the name of “halting tobacco,” Bloomberg and the organizations he funds have actively sought to poison the well of tobacco harm reduction by miscasting vaping products as “just as bad” as combustible tobacco. Even though health agencies in nations such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and even Canada actively recommend vaping products to get smokers to quit, this option is kept off the table in developing nations where Bloomberg has influence.

In February of this year, Bloomberg’s commitment to severely restrict harm reduction increased significantly to nearly $420 million, hoping to drive a larger global campaign in 110 countries around the world to cut off citizens from nicotine alternatives that are less harmful.

Over $280 million of that money will focus on developing countries, offering grants to political groups, health agencies, and politicians to implement a zero-tolerance nicotine agenda.

The issue with Bloomberg’s approach, and by extension the dozens of health and anti-tobacco groups he funds, is their denial of the real scientific evidence on tobacco harm reduction.

Rather than endorse the market-derived alternatives that have been successful in getting adult smokers to quit – much more effectively than government education programs – they have created a false equivalence between the vape and the cigarette.

That not only harms public health, but continues to fester a narrative of misinformation that has captured many public health researchers and government agencies. We know this all too well from our cross-national survey of health practitioners in Europe, in which many doctors were simply unaware of the growing category of less harmful nicotine alternatives like vaping, heat-not-burn sticks, nicotine pouches, and more.

As Bloomberg continues his global crusade against harm reduction, and many groups pick up his baton to carry out policies to deny safer options to smokers who need them in developing countries, researchers and activists must continue to underscore the need for options and consumer choice when it comes to nicotine alternatives.

Consumers, political leaders, and community activists must uphold the both scientific and anecdotal evidence provided by the consumer-led revolution in harm reduction. Only then can we continue to save lives, influence better policy, and ensure a generation of people who will have more options to live their lives, not less.

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