A St. Louis jury has ruled that cigarette makers do not owe any compensation to hospitals in Missouri for the costs of treating uninsured patients for smoking-related illnesses.
Twenty-nine plaintiffs representing 37 health institutions, mainly local and regional hospitals across Missouri, were seeking $455 million — plus punitive damages — from six tobacco companies. They alleged that the companies knowingly delivered an “unreasonably dangerous” product that burdened health providers with the costs of treating smoking-related patients who had no insurance and did not pay their bills.
“They were banking on the hospital and health industry to clean up their mess,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch quoted plaintiffs’ lawyer Ken Brostron as saying in his closing argument.
But on a 9-3 vote, the state jury sided with the tobacco companies on all of the claims, finding the hospitals were not financially damaged. “The jury’s verdict confirms this was a misguided legal theory that hospitals somehow lost money from treating individuals who smoked,”one of the defendants, Lorillard Inc., said in a news release.
The tobacco companies argued to the jury that the smokers who didn’t pay their hospital bills were a “tiny fraction” of all the hospitals’ patients. They also said their product was not defective just because it contained nicotine.
Smoking opponents once hoped that such third-party suits seeking to recover health care costs would deliver a body blow to Big Tobacco but the tactic has fizzled. The Missouri case, which was filed in 1998, was only the third to make it to trial, and the verdict could be the nail in the coffin for such litigation.
In one of the previous trials, cigarette makers prevailed and, in the other case, a verdict won by the plaintiffs was overturned on appeal.
Brostron said the Missouri hospitals haven’t decided whether to appeal. “We’ll talk to the jurors and see what the issues were,” he told Bloomberg. “We thought we made our case.”
Related Post:
Trial Gives Hospitals a Chance to Make Big Tobacco Pay for Smoking Illnesses
To refer to the cigarette industry as “tobacco companies” is to perpetrate their biggest marketing deceit…that cigarettes are automatically just tobacco, if some even contain any tobacco at all.
To assist the industry in that lie is to fail to inform duped customers that most cigarettes are packed with pesticide residues, with dioxin-creating chlorine (many pesticides and the bleached paper), carcinogenic levels of radiation from certain still legal phosphate fertilizers, with burn accelerants and addiction-enhancing substances, and with any selection from a list of about 1400 untested non-tobacco additives.
Since some brands may be made not with tobacco but with many kinds of industrial waste cellulose made in US Patented ways to “simulate” tobacco—with a measured shot of nicotine added, of course. It is impossible to get tobacco smoke, or “tobacco-related diseases” from that.
The hospitals ought know better—that many of those diseases are impossible to be caused by smoke from any plant but, instead, are known symptoms of exposures to pesticides, radiation, and dioxins. Ah, but since the hospitals are economically tied to pharmaceuticals (that make tobacco pesticides and cigarette additives) and to health insurance firms that invest billions of dollars in cigarette manufacturing, and those pharmaceuticals, and in the pesticide firms, it seems that the hospitals are happy to join that cartel in scapegoating the conveniently “sinful” tobacco plant. They prefer to blame Mother Nature’s plant, and deceived smokers, for the crimes of the broad cigarette cartel.
The hospitals (and others) need to notice that the cigarette makers were and are given government permission to so harmfully adulterate the products, to evade ingredient labeling, and now, to evade liabilities and penalties.
This is not about “smoking” or “cigarettes”—words that tell us nothing about content—or even about “tobacco” (never defined for adulterants). It is about Pesticide Pegs, Radiation Rods, and Dioxin Dowels. And, it’s about a regulatory system that is largely staffed by, and which serves the industries it is supposed to regulate.