Korea’s National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) lost again on appeal in its roughly 50 billion won ($34 million) damages suit against tobacco companies, marking a second-instance conclusion nearly 12 years after it first filed the case.
And here’s me thinking that smoking was a direct cause of lung cancer in humans was scientific fact.
Obviously not in Korea
Korea knows what the real threat is.
From my stupid understanding of Korean customs and law, the judgement must’ve been like this:
Lawyer: “Your honor, my client, the tobacco companies, generate a revenue of 10 billion won and spend 5 on advertising. The NHIS can only ever spend 1 billion against us.” Judge: “Since you have more money, tobacco companies, you are more correct. NHIS, go get fucked for not being rich enough.”
The lower court said the NHIS’s payments to medical institutions were the fulfillment of its legal obligations under the National Health Insurance Act and the execution of funds collected or supported under that law — meaning the benefit payments were a duty, not a compensable loss.
It also held that the smokers themselves did not have valid claims for damages against the tobacco companies, citing difficulty in finding defects in the cigarettes and a lack of proof of individual causation between smoking and lung cancer.
But the court said epidemiological research has limits, noting that it does not, in fact, provide precise information about what caused a particular individual’s disease.
To be fair, the argument is scientifically valid, there are many things that increase the risk of cancer, so it’s hard to pinpoint “the cause”. HOWEVER, a judge deciding that “you can’t really prove it was the smoking that caused the cancer” sounds like someone “paying” for the “free gifts” he received from his tobacco friends.
I wonder if Korean law requires such specificity for other situations.
It’s kind of like saying when a person dies of cardiac arrest in the ER no one can blame the car crash that put them there. Maybe they would have suffered cardiac arrest when they got home. 🤷
Not surprising. Korea has a HUGE population of smokers. While it has gone down in very recent years, back in 2017 almost half of all male adults were smokers. They still have 30% of the adult male population as smokers, though, which is double the US male smoking population.
