To the Editor:
The policy of firing or not hiring smokers is justified by some employers by the added health care costs; your article cites the federal estimate that “employees who smoke cost, on average, $3,391 more a year each for health care and lost productivity.”
Without granting that premise, I call your attention to your own article, “Diabetics in the Workplace Confront a Tangle of Law” (Dec. 26, 2006), in which you state that $13,243 is the estimated yearly medical costs for a diabetic, “more than five times that of workers without diabetes.” You add that “if absenteeism and productivity losses are added, diabetes ranks third as an economic cost to employers, after heart disease and hypertension.”
If dollars, not ability, are the hiring criterion, shouldn’t hospitals first refuse to hire diabetics and anyone with heart disease or hypertension, no matter how qualified?
It would seem that if the money excuse is gone, the smoker bans are starkly revealed for what they are: blatant, and highly irrational, discrimination.
Linda Stewart
New York, Feb. 11, 2011
To the Editor:
I am not a smoker; nor do I enjoy trying to make my way into the entrance of a building that is surrounded by smokers. I do, however, believe that denying an individual’s employment application based on his or her status as a smoker should not be legal.
Hospitals that are conditioning employment based on a person’s smoking status argue (and rightly so) that smokers increase the cost of insurance for the rest of the population. But asking people what they lawfully do outside of the office should not be allowed.
What if hospitals question if employees count their calories or engage in unprotected sex? Barring smokers is the camel’s nose under the tent.
Eshai J. Gorshein
Brookline, Mass., Feb. 11, 2011
To the Editor:
As the commissioner for public health for Cincinnati some 35 years ago, I cautioned against using public health policy in a way that limits individual choice. The controversies at the time included requiring the wearing of seat belts and motorcycle helmets and the forced fluoridation of water, measures that I supported from a public health perspective but that clearly limit choice and freedom.
Now employers are discriminating against employees who choose to smoke tobacco. Although one can argue that all behavior outside work may potentially affect costs to the employer and the health of employees, the slippery slope of these employers’ demands will have a significant effect on our freedom.
Are we now to allow businesses to inspect the homes and activities of their employees to assure that they all practice good, healthy habits? Will that include assuring that their children do not use skateboards without helmets, do not eat fast food and so on?
Allowing hospitals and other employers to control their employees’ activities outside of work is public health tyranny. It must be curtailed, if not by legislation, then by the courts.
Arnold Leff
Boulder Creek, Calif., Feb. 15, 2011
The writer is a doctor.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 