Activists Hope Tobacco Investment Report Fires Up Action

Anti-smoking activists hope a new report on big health insurance companies’ investments in tobacco stocks will stimulate a budding movement to persuade people and institutions to divest their tobacco holdings.

For the past few years, the Tobacco Divestment Project, an activist organization affiliated with a program at Northeastern University in Boston, has been urging foundations, universities and religious groups to sell their stock in big cigarette and chewing tobacco makers.

“It was about time the insurance companies start hearing from medical professionals and their indignation,” Brad Krevor, executive director of the Tobacco Control Resource Center at Northeastern, in reference to the report.

The report appeared in Friday’s edition of the Lancet, a British medical journal. In it, a team of Harvard University doctors analyzes millions of dollars of tobacco-related investments by major U.S. insurance companies and by some for-profit health maintenance organizations.

“What I’d like to see is insurance companies thrown out of the health care system. They’ll do anything for money,” said Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study. “We don’t need--we don’t want--running the health care system a group whose only goal is to make money and is willing to kill people to do it. The least they can do it is divest, from tobacco and other lethal and dangerous investments. And they ought to.”

Insurance companies, who manage huge portfolios on behalf of themselves and their clients, say their responsibility is to make profitable investments and to get the best possible returns, even if that means buying tobacco stock.

A few universities such as Harvard and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and several major church groups and organizations such as the American Cancer Society and the American Medical Assn. have already said they back tobacco stock divestment.