Talk Radio Hosts Say The Dumbest Things

I was listening to comedian Rush Limbaugh's rant against preventive medicine (Obamacare includes it, therefore it must be evil!) when I heard this beauty. It exemplifies the type of logical fallacy his listeners are constantly bombarded with:

And about this behavioral business, "Oh, yeah, we've really had a lot of success there." Remember when they told us, "You get people to quit smoking, and you get rid of secondhand smoke, and look at the health care cost savings that we'll have." Remember that? Oh, I do. I remember everything these little commie twits say.

I remember it, folks, because it's all BS. It is. Everything that comes out of their controlling, little, small minds is BS. So, "We can't have second-hand smoke, and if people will just quit smoking look at the cost savings in health care." Well, we've had a whole bunch of people quit smoking. In fact, it's very odd to see a smoker. The most commonplace to see a smoker is in a movie. On the screen not in the theater. Actors and actresses. That's where most smoking takes place these days. Yet last I heard, health care costs were skyrocketing at such a rate that we needed Obamacare to reduce the deficit. We've been successful with behavioral control. We have succeeded in convincing a vast majority of former smokers to give it up. Our health care costs, fshew! skyrocketed, as they continue to skyrocket.

In short, anti-smoking health policy advocates are wrong because they talked about cost-savings and health care now costs more than ever.

What's wrong with this analysis? For one thing it supposes that the only change accounting for a variation in health care costs between the 1960s and today is that now we have fewer smokers. In reality, there are plenty of non-smoking-related factors that have driven up the cost of care. Think of all the drugs, tests, therapies, machines, and specialists we use now that didn't exist forty years ago All of that stuff costs money.

The other problem with this take--symptomatic to talk radio--is the information it omits. There actually is research showing that the total lifetime medical costs for smokers are not more than those for non-smokers. It seems counterintuitive--smokers have higher insurance rates, after all--but that's what the studies say.

Here's the catch: the reason smokers don't cost more is because they tend to die ten years earlier than non-smokers. Presumably anti-smoking health care advocates view death as a bad thing. That's one of the reasons they want people to stop.

Perhaps Rush (and his target audience) views premature death differently. Perhaps they welcome it. If I had to listen to that nonsense day after day, I might welcome it too.