View Single Post
Old 07-22-2009, 03:43 PM  
kane
Too lazy to set a custom title
 
kane's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: portland, OR
Posts: 20,684
Quote:
Originally Posted by Libertine View Post
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.
So if I read that correctly it is saying that the average cost per person is higher for smokers, but when you group smokers into one group and non-smokers into another it shows that the non-smokers end up costing more total dollars.

Is that correct?

If so couldn't that simply be because there are more non-smokers than smokers? Sure all of the smokers combined cost less than all of the non-smokers combined, but what is the difference in population size?
kane is offline   Share thread on Digg Share thread on Twitter Share thread on Reddit Share thread on Facebook Reply With Quote