We agree that Measure 50's critics have some legitimate gripes.

Boiled down, it's an 84.5-cents-a-pack additional tax on a pack of cigarettes that is expected to generate enough money to provide health care of Oregon's uninsured children younger than 19. It also expands the health care to lower-income adults.

We do have some qualms about the fact that the 2007 Legislature was unable to get this passed as the Healthy Kids Initiative because not enough Republican legislators supported it. So, it is now back before voters as a tobacco tax to raise money to aid more than 100,000 youngsters in Oregon who have no health insurance.

We are dismayed that mostly low-

income, tobacco-addicted souls are being burdened with a cost that should have been equally divided among us all. And we only can hope that one critic was wrong in his concern that some tobacco-addicted parents might skimp on the families' necessities in order to finance their smoking habit.

So, Measure 50 isn't perfect.

But the argument that it puts a tax into the Constitution is a paper tiger. As today's cartoon correctly suggests, the Oregon Constitution is more of a legislature- and voter-approved dumping ground than the New Jersey salt marshes. It's been amended 24 times in the past eight years alone. Quick. How many of those amendments can you name, other than Measure 36, the one that defined marriage as between a man and a woman?

What Measure 50 is more than an unequal sin tax is an opportunity to do some good for a population that desperately needs it - one to which we already are providing health care in a far more costly and ineffective fashion - in emergency rooms, when health problems have reached a crisis level.

We're frankly puzzled why it's always easier to sell voters on a "get-tough" attitude on crime than it is on something we all know when it comes to car or home maintenance: It's always easier to fix something as a preventative measure than to pay the high cost of fixing something when it becomes an emergency.

When it comes to care of our lower-income children, we are facing an emergency.

Yes, it was more than a fortuitous appearance Monday when the news wires carried the article, "Child welfare report card gives Oregon a D" in children's health care. Where did this "report card" come from? A 15-year-old child advocacy group known as Children First for Oregon. It is a good group that has patiently tracked the gap between the dismal reality regarding child welfare issues and the idealistic goals the state set regarding those same child welfare, education, health and prosperity issues.

We're hardly surprised to learn that officials from this group testified for the Healthy Kids Initiative, which was the seed from which Measure 50 grew, and wrote an argument in favor of it that appears in the Oregon Voters Pamphlet.

We don't blame them; we blame the Legislators who didn't approve the Healthy Kids Initiative in the first place. It was a sensible and necessary piece of legislation that failed by only a few votes.

Now we have to pass this strong medicine, and now we are putting it all on smokers. It isn't fair, but even more unfair is denying children the preventive health care and services that they need.