This issue illustrates how screwed up our health care system is. While obesity could be argued to affect cop job performance, its difficult to see how smoking would impair the ability of police to perform their duties. Job performance should be the only criterion for hiring. But because for some strange reason health care in the U.S. has been coupled to employment, we have employers making health care decisions about their employees. I for one do not feel good about this even though I recognize that smoking imperils health and raises insurance rates. Perhaps the compromise that some employers have made of asking smokers in their business to pay more than non-smokers for health insurance benefits is a better way of dealing with this issue. Simply excluding smokers from employment seems somewhat irrational even though the Florida Supreme Court found it constitutional.

There are two separate issues. First is the added health care costs for smokers, and second is smoking on the job. It is easy to separate them in practice.