Tax Hike On Tobacco To Pay For Children’s Health Care Fails
In bluer-than-blue Oregon, of all places.
After the most expensive political campaign in Oregon history, voters Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a tobacco tax increase to pay for children’s health care.
The 3-to-2 vote against Measure 50, which would have increased Oregon’s cigarette tax by 85 cents a pack, follows similar defeats in California and Missouri after tobacco makers spent millions to oppose the measures.
Check out how the article casts the result as one of evil big tobacco spending millions to block the Democrat Governor of the state from making health care “more accessible” for the uninsured.
In Oregon, Reynolds American and Philip Morris, the makers of Camel and Marlboro cigarettes, spent a record $12 million, primarily on a TV commercial blitz.
The decisive failure kicks a complex public health issue back to the Legislature and Gov. Ted Kulongoski, who have been unable to make health care more accessible for an estimated 576,000 Oregonians who lack insurance.
I know it’s shocking for most liberals to learn that the average citizen would just as soon keep more of his/her own money rather than see it spent on the tiny fraction of Americans who don’t have insurance because they can’t actually get it (as opposed to those who could get it but choose not to). But hey, it’s the truth.
