hankyoreh

By Kim Yang-joong, medical correspondent

The National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) officially filed a lawsuit against four domestic and foreign tobacco companies including KT&G on Apr. 14, demanding that they pay 53.7 billion won (US$51.66 million) in compensation for the cost of treating illnesses directly related to smoking. The suit was filed eight months after the NHIS announced in Aug. 2013 that it intended to take legal actions about health problems caused by smoking. Fifteen years after individual Korean smokers took tobacco companies to court in 1999, a government organization has taken action in the area.

The suit comes four days after the Supreme Court ruled on Apr. 10 in support of a lower court that rejected damage claims that 30 individual smokers, including a person surnamed Park, 65, had filed against KT&G and the government.

The NHIS notes that, in the US, it has not been individual smokers but instead state governments that have won suits against tobacco companies, and it is confident that it will win this one.

On Monday morning, NHIS held a press conference at the agency’s main office on in Seoul’s Mapo district and announced that it had submitted legal documents to the Seoul Central District Court against four tobacco companies, including KT&G, Philip Morris International Korea, British American Tobacco Korea and British American Tobacco Korea Manufacturing Limited.

The NHIS’s lawsuit is represented by the law firm Namsan, which also handled the tobacco lawsuit for individual smokers.

The sum of 53.7 billion won claimed by the NHIS is how much the agency paid to treat South Koreans with the three kinds of cancer that are most closely associated with smoking (but only those who smoked for at least thirty years and who smoked more than a pack a day for at least twenty years).

The agency’s strategy is to increase its chances of winning the suit by beginning with requesting compensation for the costs of treating only those patients with the three kinds of cancer that are considered as being most closely correlated with smoking: small-cell carcinoma and squamous-cell carcinoma lung cancer and squamous-cell carcinoma laryngeal cancer. The suit further limits its scope to people who smoked heavily for a long period of time. In the future, the agency intends to expand its suit to include the treatment costs of other patients.

“In the lawsuit filed by individual smokers, the plaintiffs lost because the defendant, KT&G, refused to make public potentially incriminating internal documents. But the National Health Insurance Service has a good chance of winning, since it has a lot of medical and epidemiological documents, including treatment records for victims of big tobacco,” said Jeong Mi-hwa, a partner at Namsan. “Also, the lawsuit names Philips Morris and British American Tobacco, both of which have released a lot of documents in tobacco lawsuits in the US and other countries, and I do not expect them to deny the misdeeds that they themselves have admitted in the US and elsewhere.”

“We are planning to focus on revealing the causal relationship between smoking and disease. To do this, we will work with the World Health Organization, bring in expert witnesses from South Korea and overseas, and assess the harm caused by smoking after analyzing patients’ regular checkups and cancer patient registration records,” said An Sun-young, an in-house lawyer at the NHIS who is a member of the agency’s legal team for this lawsuit. “We will also demonstrate the illegal actions of tobacco companies using testimony of whistleblowers at these companies.”

“Smoking is causing serious harm to ordinary people, and particularly the young and women,” said a source at the NHIS on condition of anonymity. “The future of the country and the sustainability of national health insurance are reason enough to use the lawsuit in our continuing efforts to create a stigma against smoking. This is a clear duty for a state institution that is responsible for public health and that is in charge of insurance finances.”

In related news, the Korean Association on Smoking or Health (KASH) and Korean Smokers’ Association (KSA) both issued press releases on Monday indicating their stances on the NHIS’s tobacco lawsuit.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]