Quote:
Originally Posted by crockett
Ummm no they don't. Smoking related illness costs states shit loads of money. In fact I think it's at the top of the list. This was from 98.
http://berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/...6/smoking.html
72.7 billion a year is what it cost in the US alone and it costs each state a shit load as well.
" She pointed out that the 1993 bill for California alone amounted to $8.7 billion, the highest total in the nation, followed by New York, with $6.6 billion in smoking-related disease costs. Wyoming, at $80 million in 1993, had the lowest expenditure for illness caused by cigarette smoking. |
Please allow me to educate you.
There are two things you should know about studies like this:
1 - Many studies like this don't compensate for the money saved by avoiding extra costs due to longer lifespans. And if they don't, they're entirely worthless.
2 - The line
"translates the adverse health effects (of smoking) into dollar terms, the universal language of decision makers" from the article indicates that, like many studies, this study also gives an arbitrary "economic value" to years of life gained. The typical value of a year? $10k-$50k, depending on the study in question. That's not actual money, though. It's not "the monetary gains of an extra year of life", but the "intrinsic value" of living.
Every single study that doesn't fuck up these two things arrives at the same conclusion: if people quit smoking, it gives short-term economic benefits but long-term economic costs which outweigh the benefits, at least on a financial level.
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/337/15/1052 <- I already posted this before, but it seems as if people aren't getting the message.
This chart sums it up pretty well:
At any given age, smokers are individually more expensive than non-smokers.
However, because they tend to die younger, as a group they are less expensive overall - simply because relatively few will make it to 80, and the older you get, the more health care you will need, on average.