|
 |
30 States Protect Smoking Employees
"Thirty states, including Virginia, protect employees from being penalized for lawful activity, such as smoking, outside work. [D.C.] explicitly protects smokers from employment discrimination."
An Intrusion — Or A Helpful Boost
By JEFFREY B. COHEN | Courant Staff Writer
November 23, 2007
Employers around the country are looking for ways to lower the cost of employee health benefits and encourage their employees to lead healthier lifestyles.
Earlier this year, the Tribune Co.— which owns, among other things, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and The Courant — announced that in 2008 it will charge $1,200 a year above the regular health benefits premium for any employee using its coverage who is a smoker, or who has a dependent who smokes.
The fee is a sore point for smokers' advocates like George Koodray, who say that such fees are both selective and unfair. Koodray is a volunteer with The Smoker's Club, Inc. But the fee is popular with people like Helen Darling, head of the National Business Group on Health. Her nonprofit membership organization represents large employers, including 65 of the Fortune 100.
"This kind of philosophy in general is punitive and almost a predatory philosophy towards smokers, because I think they've just been an easy target over the past few years.
There are a lot of other lifestyle habits, including overeating — and I wouldn't imagine that most employers would want to broach that subject, because it would be seen as a really offensive approach to individual employees if we were to categorize people based on their weight levels. … That's a more politically incorrect approach to take; so, instead, it's the smokers.
But does anybody want to put their lifestyle choices, to have them priced based on who's more of a risk societally?
I'm a cigar smoker, and I have only three or four cigars in a given week at the most. … [But should policies like these] include a person who's at three packs a day and include them with a person who might smoke a cigar or two a week?
Why is it that there isn't some sort of consideration for those who drink alcohol to excess, or use drugs, for that matter, or engage in other unsafe practices? That can involve all kinds of things, from parasailing to motorcycling. It opens up an entire, unlimited universe."
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Interview With Michael Siegel
Massachusetts Some group within the tobacco control movement needs to develop the integrity and courage to stand apart from their colleagues and start questioning the justification for smoker discrimination.
Interview: Michael Siegel
11/26/2007
By Waldemar Ingdahl
Michael Siegel is a Professor of Social & Behavioral Sciences at Boston University School of Public Health. He is co-author of a book, entitled Marketing Public Health: Strategies to Promote Social Change and was namned a maverick anti-smoking activist by Jacob Sullum at Reason Magazine. We wanted to get to know more about his views, than we have read on his blog The Rest of the Story so Waldemar Ingdahl asked him some questions on tobacco control policy and harm reduction. What is coming up in the near future?
-----
Waldemar Ingdahl: What are the main issues in tobacco control at present, in your opinion? Is it second hand smoke, harm reduction, smoking bans, or something else?
Michael Siegel: There are several main issues in tobacco control at present. The first is identifying a national strategy that makes the most sense in terms of regulating tobacco products. A large number of organizations have put their resources into an effort to pass legislation that would give the FDA limited regulatory authority over tobacco products. In my view, this would be a grave mistake, as giving FDA the responsibility to approve cigarettes will give these products a government seal of approval. It will create a public perception that these products are safer; yet, there is no evidence that there is anything in this legislation that will make cigarettes any safer. If anything, this legislation will make it impossible for manufacturers of potentially safer products (e.g., Swedish snus) to make any claims that would imply that their products are potentially safer.
The second major issue I see is the extent to which anti-smoking advocates will go to pursue smoking bans. While in the past, the focus has been on protecting nonsmokers in the workplace, including bars and restaurants, there are now movements afoot to ban smoking virtually everywhere - including all outdoors locations, streets, sidewalks, parks, and now in cars and perhaps even inside the private home. As a strong supporter of workplace smoking bans, I feel like I have just completed a marathon and everyone else has continued running. I thought the goal was to provide nonsmokers with a safe working environment. Now the goal seems to be to prevent every possible wisp of smoke from reaching a nonsmoker, even if it is only momentary. I think that the tobacco control movement needs desperately to define its ultimate goal. It also needs to re-examine the science base supporting the policies which it is proposing. The third major
issue I see is the deterioration of the scientific integrity within the tobacco control movement. This has occurred, in part, because the tobacco companies are no longer holding anti-smoking groups accountable for their public statements. For example, in their effort to promote widespread outdoor smoking bans, many groups are claiming that a single 30-minute exposure to secondhand smoke can cause a heart attack or heart disease in an otherwise healthy person. This blatant exaggeration is going to end up hurting the movement by undermining its credibility. This is a scientific crisis within the tobacco control movement, and it must be dealt with immediately.
WI: Earlier this year you published an article in the journal Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations in which you faulted the tobacco control movement for misrepresenting the acute cardiovascular effects of exposure to secondhand smoke. What is the misrepresentation concerning in short words? What reactions did you receive after the article?
MS: In short, anti-smoking groups have widely misrepresented the acute cardiovascular effects of secondhand smoke. Nearly 100 groups are disseminating messages which imply that brief exposure to secondhand smoke can cause heart disease, hardening of the arteries, heart attacks, strokes, clogged arteries, or fatal arrhythmias in healthy nonsmokers. These claims are unsupported by scientific evidence. While the evidence shows that chronic exposure can cause all of these conditions, there is no evidence that a single brief exposure can cause any cardiovascular disease in a healthy person. The reaction I have received to my questioning of the accuracy of these statements has been, without exception, ad hominem. I have been personally attacked and my character has been questioned. The only thing I have not received is a substantive response, in which an anti-smoking organization or advocate defends the statements these groups are making by actually providing some scientific evidence to back them up.
WI: What is your opinion of the harm reduction theory and the present discussion about smokeless tobacco? Is it a step in the right direction, or is it something that detracts from complete smoking cessation or the use of NRTs?
MS: Despite my experience in tobacco control, I am humble enough to admit that I don't have any answers. This is a very difficult question and I don't think there is a simple answer: thumbs up or thumbs down. For one thing, I think it depends largely on the way in which it would be done. Obviously, if we start promoting smokeless tobacco use, that is not going to be productive from a health standpoint. On the other hand, if we present smokeless tobacco as a "last resort" option for people who want to quit smoking but are simply not able to do so, that may be a very different thing. I don't have the answers. I don't pretend to be able to predict exactly what the net public health costs and benefits would be. To me, the important thing is that the tobacco control community be able to have an honest, open, and science-based discussion of this issue without people fearing that they are going to be attacked because of the positions that they take. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening right now because I find the tobacco control field to be a poisonous one where people are attacked based on their positions, not based on the quality of their arguments.
WI: What is your view of excise taxation on tobacco products? Is it achieving public health objectives, is it just about government revenues- or does it fall in somewhere in the middle?
MS: I believe that the way cigarette excise taxes were originally used (such as in California in 1993 - to fund smoking-related programs such as treatment for tobacco-related diseases and research), they did help to achieve public health objectives. However, in the last 8-9 years, I think cigarette taxes are being used to fund every program under the sun. To me, this is more harmful than beneficial. It creates a government dependence on continued cigarette consumption, and it removes any incentive for the government to do anything serious about reducing cigarette use. The recent proposal to fund SCHIP (children's health insurance) by increasing the cigarette excise tax is the worst example of a public health policy. The last thing we want to do is to tie children's health insurance to continued cigarette consumption. The idea is absurd to me. Why would we want to tie the financial health of our nation's children to the continued consumption of cigarettes? Does it make sense to kill off adults so that kids can have health care coverage? While I think it makes sense to use cigarette tax revenues to fund smoking-related programs - especially treatment for smoking-related diseases - I think it makes no sense to rely upon cigarette consumption to fund all kinds of necessary government programs that have nothing to do with cigarette use.
WI: What developments in tobacco control policies do you see forthcoming in the next five years?
MS: I think there is going to be an expansion of the scope of smoking bans. We are going to see proposals to ban smoking in almost all outdoor locations, including streets, sidewalks, and parking lots. We are also going to see more smoking bans in cars. We will also see the first wave of smoking bans in the private home. There will be further promotion of employment discrimination policies against smokers and housing discrimination policies against smokers. Some group within the tobacco control movement needs to develop the integrity and courage to stand apart from their colleagues and start questioning the justification for smoker discrimination. This is a role that I have been playing, largely through my tobacco policy blog. It looks like I'll have my work cut out for me for the next five years.
|
|
|
|
|
|
OH TV health segments
Ohio Quarter-million-dollar campaign: The OSU Medical Center pays big bucks to channels 4 and 10 for spots featuring their anchors.
AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR
TV health segments might look like news, but many are paid for by hospitals
NOVEMBER 29, 2007
BY STEPH GREEGOR
Quarter-million-dollar campaign: The OSU Medical Center pays big bucks to channels 4 and 10 for spots featuring their anchors
Andrea Cambern might be the most trusted news anchor in Columbus. For 16 years, she has cultivated a relationship with Columbus viewers as part of the 10TV news team.
Cambern has been honored with six Emmy awards and named Female Anchor of the Year by the National Association of Television Journalists. This fall, she was inducted into the Ohio Radio and Television Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
So she’s believable when she appears in reports reinforcing the notion that the Ohio State University Medical Center is a fine facility. What those clips don’t mention is that Ohio State paid Channel 10 for them.
Cambern and NBC4 anchor Amy Basista have become public faces of the OSU Medical Center. Cambern appears in Channel 10’s Breakthroughs in Medicine, for which Ohio State pays the station almost $100,000 annually. Basista hosts Channel 4’s Med Breaks, for which the station rakes in almost $150,000 a year.
Cambern said she isn’t paid extra for doing the spots, and she does the research and writing herself, though Ohio State reviews the segments before they run.
OhioHealth also pays Channel 10 for quarterly health segments hosted by Cambern.
Cambern’s health pieces are treated differently by 10TV than anchor Heather Pick’s Pediatric HealthSource features, which are sponsored by Nationwide Children’s Hospital, McDonald’s and Nationwide Insurance.
While Pick’s stories feature interviews with experts from Children’s, the hospital’s VP for marketing and PR, Donna Teach, said that is mostly because Children’s is the “only game in town” when it comes to inpatient pediatric care.
And the Children’s stories are different from the OSU spots in a key way. “We have zero control over what gets aired,” Teach said. “It runs like any other news story.”
Mount Carmel Health markets itself on ABC6 and Fox 28 through “Strides in Medicine,” which features freelance reporter Susan Burton talking to that hospital system’s experts.
The practice of featuring journalists in health reports paid for and approved by hospitals is widespread not just in Columbus but nationally. It’s a development that has prompted an accomplished health journalist to speak out.
“I believe people think they are getting different points of view—that this person has gone out and read the literature and investigated whether this procedure is good,” said Trudy Lieberman, the director of health and medicine reporting in the graduate school of journalism at City University of New York. Earlier this year, Lieberman wrote “The Epidemic,” an article on hospital marketing ads posing as newscasts, for the Columbia Journalism Review.
“All procedures have downsides as well as positive effects, and I think the public expects to be told that,” she said.
Rick Rogala, VP and general manager of NBC4, rejected criticism of health segments—“They’re not ads, they’re vignettes,” he said—that air on his station.
“We do health stories every single day, and we cover all sides, all things that are out there,” Rogala said. “Not every story we do has every piece of information that it can. It’s about the depth and breadth of coverage over time.”
“It’s really important that people like Trudy are out there to champion ethical health coverage,” he said. “The reality is, a television station that maintains editorial control I don’t believe is doing anything ethically wrong.”
Sue Jablonski, chief communications officer at the OSU Medical Center, knows that anchor-hosted ads are uniquely valuable because of the faith viewers have in the TV reporters.
Health-care marketing is “very personal,” she said. “It’s very confidential. So having that trust relationship is very important.”
TV news personalities, she said, “are probably already trusted as somebody who will present the facts.”
Lieberman argues that while the ad information may be factual, it isn’t “the whole story.” A particular concern of hers is paid TV segments on the benefits of procedures that are “high tech, high cost.”
She cited bariatric surgery, also called weight-loss surgery, as one example: “There’s a lot of controversy surrounding this procedure and that this may not be a good intervention for someone.”
Viewers didn’t hear much about that debate from NBC4’s Basista when she did a Med Breaks segment called “Bariatric Surgery Offers Hope.”
During the opening, Basista noted that OSU doctors want you to know this is a “serious surgery.” After that, it was all smiles as an OSU doctor spoke highly of the hospital’s services and a woman who had a successful bariatric operation at OSU said there’s “hope” for overweight individuals.
The segment doesn’t mention the cost of bariatric surgery: $10,000 to $40,000. Also missing is the mortality rate, which, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, ranges from less than 3 percent for young patients up to nearly 7 percent for those 65 years of age and older, at 90 days post-operation.
Channel 4’s Rogala doesn’t believe those omissions in a single piece are a problem.
“The same thing could be said if we did a story on the mortality rate of bariatric surgery and someone could say, ‘Hey what about the good things?’” Rogala said. “You would hope the consumer would never take one nugget and make a decision based on one nugget.”
The problem, Lieberman said, is that the line between marketing and news is blurred.
“I believe journalists should be on the journalism side of it, not the marketing side of it,” she said. “And consumers should be aware of what they’re seeing.”
The question then becomes whether the spots are clearly identified as advertising, both over the air and on the web.
The Radio-Television News Directors Association’s Guidelines for Balancing Business Pressures and Journalism Values says that “a news operation’s online product should clearly separate commercial and editorial content and maintain the same high journalistic and ethical standards as the on-air product.”
“RTNDA’s position is pretty clear,” said Brian Trauring, an RTNDA board member and former chairman of its ethics committee. “We’re always in favor of full disclosure.”
NBC4 is the only Columbus station that labels its paid health spot as advertising on its website. None of the stations labels the spots as paid advertisements in the on-air versions, though they do introduce the spots by referencing the OSU Medical Center.
“The spots are clearly labeled and messaged as being from the Ohio State University Medical Center. This is done purposely to communicate to the viewer that the information is sponsored by OSU,” said Jablonski. “Part of our goal with these spots is to reach the public with critical health care information. The ultimate goal, of course, is to save lives, and the paid segments are an important tool in helping us do that.”
Jablonski said she is “very comfortable” with anchors delivering the information in the ads because it’s presented in an “educational manner.”
Rogala described each of his station’s vignettes as “a short-form program that delivers information.”
“It says ‘advertisement’ because there is a sponsorship to it, because some people might want to go on the site and not see an ad. I’m not saying it’s an ad; it’s a sponsorship,” he said.
No matter what you call it, Lieberman said it’s misleading.
“They do it deliberately so you don’t really know what you’re watching,” said Lieberman. “Is there a way to more clearly label these things? I don’t know that there is. What is the news station gonna say? ‘This is really a news story but it’s brought to you by Ohio State University’? You won’t get the really honest, forthright disclosure that you need.”
One way to help viewers understand that they’re seeing advertising, said Lieberman, would be to stop airing medical commercials featuring news personalities during newscasts. “But,” she added, “that would lessen the value of it.”
The treatment of the spots by all three Columbus news operations includes graphics associating them with the stations. Channel 10 includes the phrase “10TV News HD” under Andrea Cambern’s name, while NBC4 places “NBC 4 Health Reporter” under Amy Basista’s name. ABC6/Fox 28 runs a banner that prominently displays its station’s logo on the left-hand side. The graphics also include the OSU Medical Center logo.
“It’s really disguised public relations coming in the guise of a newscast,” said Lieberman.
And that’s fine with the hospitals, whose job is to get their message out, not ponder journalistic purity.
“Whether you like it or not, we are a business,” said Jablonski at OSU. “You don’t know what we don’t tell you. We have to market our services.”
For a year of that marketing, Ohio State pays 10TV $99,400 and NBC4 $147,800, Jablonski said, adding, “The difference in price is related to the frequency in which the spots air on each station.”
Cambern said she personally writes the script for each spot, completes the interviews and creates the final package. OSU reviews each segment before it airs, but Cambern said it’s only to ensure the accuracy of the terminology and content.
Though NBC4’s OSU spots are reviewed by the hospital, too, Rogala said you won’t see a news personality associated with a message where the news station doesn’t “bear the ultimate responsibility for the content.”
“I know we have ultimate editorial control. OSU absolutely can’t change the content unless it’s for accuracy.”
Jablonski and Cambern both argue that these spots, however they come about, are beneficial for Columbus viewers.
OSU is an educational facility where the paid segments are not “tied to business goals,” said Jablonski. Cambern said she believes she’s doing something that helps viewers.
“You know what?” Cambern said. “Anybody that questions the value of those things, I can show you the value every day. The reality is, to take up 30 seconds of time—which you could have sold to some advertiser, you know, a Thighmaster or something—you get this health news.”
“We need sponsorships. They help us get these messages out.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home 
