Saturday, 20 March 2010

Do smokers pay their way?














So what do we do? Tax people who take exercise?

Thanks to Klaus K.


A couple more...




Thanks to Dave A for spotting these.


DaveA said...

On the money again CS. There of course are these 2 studies, one American and the other Dutch.



That's according to the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and Environment, which found that while "a person of normal weight costs on average £210,000 over their lifetime", a smoker clocks up just £165,000 and the obese run up an average £187,000 bill.

The team's findings, published in the Public Library of Science (PLoS), are based on modelling "three hypothetical populations from the age of 20, to see how much they would cost in medical bills throughout the different stages of their lives",

Witterings From Witney said...

As MW pointed out a few days ago, CS, us smokers die earlier thus saving shed loads of money in health care costs and pensions.

As ever, an excellent post on your part CS.

Moriquendi said...

Do these studies take into account the full gamut of smoking-related costs to the infrastructure? Most of them pertain to simply lung cancer and a few other respiratory diseases, but neglect strokes, long-term asthma, infertility (and its acompanying long term treatment), miscarriages, childhood asthma, bowel cancer, adult amputation (and it's long term cost in infrastructure) (amongst others) and all second-hand environmental health effects. Sick-days are also unaccounted for, as quite rightly one cannot say with any confidence whether a specific day is lost to the economy through smoking, but one can reasonably assume that in the general picture, a significant amount of them will be so.

Then there are house fire deaths, which bear a cost for health, emergency services and legal investigation, the vast majority of which are smoking related. Road deaths caused by the act of igniting, smoking and extinguishing cigarettes are a factor too. More disturbing to me is the relatively low increase in tax on cigarettes compared to the alarming rise of the cost of healthcare, which renders the pre-2000 studies as pretty much obsolete.

Also, to make the leap from 'smoking keeps you thin' to ' all fat people are non smokers so the health burden of all fat people must be weighed in on the non-smoking side' is utterly ridiculous, for obvious reasons.

And, lurking behind all this is the idea that the cost of a long life can be unfavourably compared to an early death from smoking; a great example of where desperate scrabbling for supporting statistics can land you. If early death from smoking is a positive, then to extrapolate this view, then surely the earlier the death, the better. The absolute ideal outcome would, in fact, be for humans to either do the decent thing and die after reproducing and working their lowest-paid years or, to cut out the paperwork, never exist at all.

Snowdon said...


The studies generally take the total health care costs from all smoking-related diseases, including SHS. The most quoted studies (ie. NOT those above) include all sort of other costs which are private costs (eg. sick days, smoking breaks, house fires), internalities (eg. private medical costs, lost earnings), or intangible (emotional costs, years of life lost). The taxpayer pays for none of these so it is only the public costs (health care, police, fire brigade) that need to be considered in the context of sin taxes and 'paying their way'.

Whether the cause of death is lung cancer, CVD, stroke or whatever, the key question is whether these diseases are more expensive to treat that the diseases smokers would have died of had they not smoked. The answer is no, and the savings in pensions, prescriptions, nursing care, operations etc. outweigh any extra costs of smoking during a smoker's working life. The Baal study does a good job of explaining this 'substitute disease' effect. Many of the cost studies that are commonly cited are just that - cost studies. What policy makers need are cost-benefit studies, which are listed above.

No studies assume that "all fat people are nonsmokers". I'm not sure where you got that from, nor do I know why you think tobacco taxes have been relatively low since 2000. They have continued to rise and are far outweigh even the highest estimates of smoking-related costs to the treasury.

Your last paragraph is technically correct. The cost-effective age of death is 65. Therefore it should be obvious that it costs for state more if people die at 70 than at 80. No one is suggesting that smoking be encouraged to save the taxpayer money. What the studies are saying is that the argument that reducing smoking (or obesity, or - probably - drinking) will save the taxpayer money is ill-founded.