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Governments that provide comprehensive healthcare funding have an incentive to want people to stop smoking. Whether some governments actually want that is an exercise in guesswork.


> Governments that provide comprehensive healthcare funding have an incentive to want people to stop smoking.

The incentive is to keep people smoking. Counter-intuitive as it sounds, smokers spend less on healthcare.[1]

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/greg-mankiw-on-...

Edit: This is consistent with real-world observation. Anti-smoking policy is the greatest in the US where the plutocracy benefits from increased healthcare spending, and relatively lower in social welfare states in Europe.


That depends on how much revenue the tobacco tax is bringing in and how much they can push the healthcare funding off on the taxpayers.




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