There's a flip side to just about everything, and so it is with reports that something or other is costing Oregon a certain amount.

For instance, a while ago the Oregon Environmental Council issued a statement on the cost of environmental disease. Now you would think that disease brought on by pollution is a serious enough issue without bringing up money. But the group says that based on estimates, census data and previous studies, "sickness caused by pollution … costs the state well over a billion dollars a year."

Asthma among children and adults, for starters, is said to have an annual cost of $30 million. Cardiovascular disease among adults is pegged at $342.5 million a year. Cancer adds another $131 million, and lead exposure among children costs a whopping $878 million a year. And so on.

Never mind that some of these figures seem pretty much pulled from the air - the Public Health Division has only a rough guess of lead poisoning among Oregon children at 1,000 to 2,000 cases, for example, mostly from the painted trim on old windows - what is the point of assigning costs when every actual cost is also an item of revenue to someone else?

Obviously there's a cost to illness - to the patient and to the insurance company, and maybe to the employer who has to pay someone else. But if the actual cost of an illness is $10,000 in real dollars, someone receives that $10,000 in additional revenue. So in terms of Oregon as a whole, the cost of illness most likely is a wash.

Crass though it may sound, consider that the health care business is among the fastest-growing segments of the Oregon economy in terms of employment (5,200 more jobs last December than the year before), and that this would not be happening unless there were more people who needed the care. It sounds absurd to say that the health effects of environmental pollution add a billion dollars to the Oregon economy in terms of money turning over and adding to employment, but if the "cost" is that high, then the gain on the other side of the ledger has to be just about the same.

No matter what accountants and activists say, though, the most important cost of illness and disability is not in cash but in the suffering they cause and the years of life they take away. (hh)