|
 If 10 percent of American smokers gave up cigarettes and the rest
cut back by 10 percent, the U.S. could shave $63 billion off medical
costs the next year, the analysis found.
"You start to see the benefits quickly, and they're huge because
healthcare costs are so gigantic," study coauthor Stanton Glantz
told Reuters Health. He directs the Center for Tobacco Control
Research and Education at the University of California, San
Francisco.
The study is the first to project cost savings within a year of
smoking reductions throughout all 50 states and the District of
Columbia.
Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, told Reuters Health that the study adds to the
evidence showing a payoff for tobacco-control interventions.
"This study is another good documentation that tobacco control
really is a best buy," said Frieden, who was not involved in the
study. "We need to invest in it because it will save lives and save
money."
The analysis makes the case for tobacco-control policies as "a very
good form of health care and societal investment by governments,"
according to the authors of an editorial accompanying the study in
PLOS Medicine.
The report points out that California and Arizona slashed healthcare
costs following smoking reductions. Research also has shown that
smokers who quit cut their risk of heart and asthma attacks within a
month, and pregnant women who stopped smoking were more likely to
deliver infants at healthy birth weights than smokers, Glantz said.
The new study found that regions with lower smoking rates had
substantially lower medical costs from 1992 through 2009.
Californians spent $15.4 billion less on healthcare in 2009 than
they would have if they smoked as much as the national average, the
analysis estimates. At the other extreme, Kentucky residents spent
an estimated $1.7 billion more than the national average on
healthcare because they smoked more. (See state by state map here:
http://bit.ly/1XgElkW.)
The study quantifies how varying regional smoking rates might
translate into healthcare costs. Using 2012 data, it estimates a
$6.3 billion drop in healthcare spending following a 10 percent
relative reduction in smoking prevalence based on state and national
averages in a single year.
“Tobacco control – in addition to being good public policy in the
long run – is an important contributor to medical cost-containment
in the short run,” Glantz said.
[to top of second column] |
When the U.S. Surgeon General first linked smoking to lung cancer in
1964, 43 percent of American adults were smokers; today that
proportion is 18 percent, according to the CDC.
Despite the decline, smoking still kills more than 480,000 Americans
a year, and thousands of the nation’s youth take up the habit every
day, Wayne Hall from the University of Queensland, Australia and
Chris Doran from Central Queensland University write in their
editorial.
“Smoking remains the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S.,
and it is driving up our healthcare costs,” Frieden said. “On the
flip side, tobacco-control measures save lives and save money. The
states that do more on tobacco control see their people live longer
and cost less in health care.”
Tobacco-control measures include raising cigarette taxes, creating
smoke-free environments, airing hard-hitting anti-smoking ads and
helping smokers quit.
Tobacco’s financial toll in the U.S. today amounts to an annual $300
billion, with nearly $170 billion in direct medical care for adults
and more than $156 billion in lost productivity, the editorialists
write.
U.S. states spend only a small fraction of the $3.3 billion the CDC
recommends for tobacco control, they continue. “Appropriate state
expenditure would accelerate the decline in tobacco use in youth and
adults and bring forward an end to the tobacco smoking epidemic
while saving billions of dollars in avoidable health care costs,”
they conclude.
The tobacco industry spends a million dollars every hour to promote
its products, Frieden said, adding: “We in public health need to do
everything we can to promote the facts.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/21XNlMR and http://bit.ly/23IBKAC PLOS
Medicine, online May 10, 2016.
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
