By: Theodore King - The Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust (TSET) is a billion dollar smoked piggy bank for healthcare with very little healthcare being given to Oklahomans. Voters approved a constitutional amendment to create TSET as a state agency in 2000 to spend money from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) between the tobacco companies and 46 states, including Oklahoma, that sued the tobacco companies for the states’ treating people with smoking-related illnesses. TSET today has collected payments amounting to a billion dollars. By 2025 it may have two billion dollars. Since 2001, TSET has spent the interest from those payments, which amounts to 290 million dollars. TSET is a cash cow milked mostly for the benefit of others, so remotely related to healthcare costs including Medicaid, as to be extraneous to those purposes for which the MSA money was intended.
