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Do Smokers Cost Health Care More Than Non Smokers?
Posted by goshopper1 • 4/09/09 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: dollars, dying, health care, smoking
According to this report there is a controvesy over smokers and nonsmokers.Smokers it says save healthcare dollars by dying 10 years early. Non-smokers, on the other hand live
longer costing their health care systems more.
You can read the report on my blog post.
healthyoupromo.blogspot.com/2009/04/smokers-die-sooner-cost-health-care.htm...
User Comments
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Some smokers cost more, some do not. Just as some overweight people cost more, and some do not. Just as some underweight people cost more, and some do not. Just as some drinkers cost more, and some do not.
My great grandmother's care, and my grandmother's care cost about the same in the end - one never drank, never smoked, and ate healthy for the entirety of her life. The other was a heavy drinker, and a four pack a day smoker.
*shrug*-
I agree. -
That has been my observation also.
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I would suggest that smokers end up costing more because while they are alive they weigh significantly more heavily on the health system. Just because a person lives longer by not smoking doesn't mean they are using the health system heavily for the additional years of their life. Smokers do have a higher incidence of hospitalization, in particular the 1 in 4 smokers who will develop COPD will be very expensive to the health system as the disease very slowly kills them. I wrote about the increase in the population of those with COPD in one of my blog articles.-
Bravo! Well said.
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I would suggest that they cost less. Because although they cost more during their lives, they live shorter lives, the nursing homes are packed with non smokers. Costing a lot more than the dead smokers do 6 feet under.
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In addition to receive less pension I think smokers pay their medical care with taxes on cigarettes.
In Italy taxes are about 2,5 dollar for a box. -
If it's not smoking it'll be something else each of us needs lots of insurance for. I have a healthy lifestyle, diet and weight and still cost my insurance company over $100,000 in the last two years. As Mark Twain said, "You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't."
I wish we all could live right, not get any major ailments, and quietly die in our sleep. -
I would think people who live unhealthily and make poor health choices are more likely to be a burden in general. Severe obesity is probably as bad as smoking. -
I think everyone is way off. Smoking/Non-Smoking isn't the biggest factor - It's Cancer. Smoking causes some cancer but not all.
The republicans created cancer a while ago in order for a population correction to favor the rich(if Rush can spew bullshit, so can I). Too many people are profiting off cancer, why are their commericals on TV for it? Between all the hospitalization, chemo, drugs etc..
The doctors are at fault here. They charge too much for too little. I'll smoke my face off till the day I die, which will probably be sooner than I think. I don't hate America, Doctors do. -
The premise of social health care is that you are providing to each person according to his need. If a smoker needs more health care, then social health care should provide more health care. You can't be picky about which ailments you want to attend to when your need is your only entitlement to health care.
Naturally, I don't think social health care is a good idea.-
That is one view of social health care and does lead to a system with unmanageable costs and inefficiencies. However, an alternate is a system in which some onus is placed on individuals to take certain actions or lose their coverage. Doctors could be asked to be gatekeepers by reporting whether a person with COPD stopped smoking or not. They could report on whether those who were morbidly obese were taking action to reduce their weight. It might be a hard pill to swallow, but could be a system that would cost less and really help those who need some motivation to be healthy.
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"social health care" is kind of beside the point. The fact is that we mostly don't leave indigent people to die in the streets and most people who die of COPD in the United States stop working, exhaust their disability and other insurance benefits, spend all of their savings and then finally are poor enough to qualify for medicaid whereupon they go right back to the same doctors and hospitals they've used all along and medicaid pays until they die. We Already have "socialized health care". I just wish we could set up the system a bit more logically.-
Social health care is besides the point? Yet the issues are that people end up on social health care and rely on social health care until they die? And that social health care is not set up logically? Right. Besides the point.
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I would disagree that "socialized health care" is "beside the point", but agree at the same time with your other points. However, it is important to differentiate between state-sanctioned social health care and more or less random actions of those sympathetic individuals and organizations trying to aid those who have fallen through the cracks. The difference between the two is considerable because the assistance that one will get without a system is dependent on what economic status they started at, who noticed them having difficulties and who was able to help.
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My _point_ is that most people who rail against socialized health care fail to realize that we 1)already have it and 2) need to change it so that it works for everyone rather than somehow eliminate it. If you really want to argue that we should let poor people die out on the street rather than in hospital beds, you can I suppose. But believe me I will be Right There to point up what a heartless position that is.
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I do argue that we should do away with socialised medicine. I do not however agree that this would cause poor people to die on the streets.
Think of any privatised service industry and compare its efficiency and its range of prices with that of any government controlled industry. It is this kind of efficiency that I would like to see in the health care industry, meaning there will be more variety in health care pricing and more variety in medicine pricing than we currently have.This results in more people being able to afford health care without having to rely on government structures in the first place.
If you compare the prices of public schools versus private schools: the reality is because there are public schools, private schools can charge grossly inflated prices. If there weren't public schools, a poor community would have to provide its own educational institutes at market related prices for that community. The same principle counts for hospitals. Private health care costs much more than public health care because there is already an alternative in place. If there weren't any public health care institutes, private institutes would be forced to cater for the market at market related prices. -
flamingpoodle,
Your remark about privately run organizations being more efficient seems utterly irrelevant to me. Unless you are VERY rich, you could not Possibly hope to Ever be able to pay for extended hospitalization and care at the rates hospitals charge the uninsured. Having watched over and been with my late spouse as he died from COPD, pretty much under exactly the circumstances I described, I know from experience that had he NOT been able to receive Medicaid (after we quite literally sent our entire life savings to an insurance company to keep up his COBRA) he would have died at home or on the street (without his welfare benefits we might not have been able to keep our apartment during his final months). I get extremely irritated at people who bemoan "socialized medicine" when it is quite clear that haven't a bloody clue what they are talking about.
And while private school parents may certainly experience sticker shock at tuition rates, in most cases the private school tuition is in fact LESS than taxpayers spend per pupil for public schools. You seem to have very strong opinions but precious little actual knowlege. -
Your remark about privately run organizations being more efficient seems utterly irrelevant to me. Unless you are VERY rich, you could not Possibly hope to Ever be able to pay for extended hospitalization and care at the rates hospitals charge the uninsured.
The reasons of which I believe I covered.
And while private school parents may certainly experience sticker shock at tuition rates, in most cases the private school tuition is in fact LESS than taxpayers spend per pupil for public schools.
Which highlights my point that the private industry is more efficient than government controlled industries. I covered that in my post. You agree with me.
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Under Nazism children were learning at school by doing math exercices how much the old and handicapped cost to the German Nation.
Guess we're coming back to that dark age with these kind of arguments and that Euthanasia will begin to be authorized first for very serious illness and then generalized to anybody that want to get rid of himself (of course with generalized depression that is easy). -
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People who make unhealthy choices do become a financial burden to their health system so it is more a local issue. Their health system is therefore the one to pick up the costs. Some systems may report a savings on the part of smokers and some may not. One may have to look at other factors such as the tax dollars from smokers versus the cost of living longer.
In the long run being healthy is the important.-
Then let suppress tobacco, alcohol etc. we will go back to happy days again
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The deregulated chemical, biological military dictatorship had to blame America's health problems on something else. Blaming the breathing of vaporised plants, especially an addictive one, was the easiest thing to blame... and most financialy rewarding.
Humanity has been breathing the air from our rain forests, without a filter, for millions of years, and they are the healthiest people on the planet, having the highest Longevity of all nations.-
On the contrary. It's a very carefully regulated biological military dictatorship.
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you can't just lump all smokers together .. some smoke a pack a day, some two packs, some 2 cigarettes ... it's all individual (blows smoke rings @ the screen)
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Hey Guys why do you complain about Health cost, it's upon that cost that the Big Pharma make money and so the economy runs. Cost is not a problem per se, it's the distribution of wealth in the pocket of the middle class instead of the super wealthy that counts. If people were paid enough they could have less stress, less drug, tobacco and alcohol and live a more healthier life.
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Yeah, probably, but WTF? If the U.S. health care system wasn't all screwed up, nobody would care. Proper health care should be a right, not a debate. -
I'll begin with the fact that I am a smoker. I am not overweight or underweight, 6'8" @ 260 lbs. I do not go to my doctor for any related issues for being a smoker. Our healthcare, the news, and hype all try to promote whatever their agenda for that week is. Then. people think about it, debate about it, and complain about how the medical system is broken. One thing you forgot tho. Ask yourself if you are a part of the problem with our healthcare or are you a part of the solution. There is no "right" answer. Everyone will have their opininion, but reading through the posts, I saw no answers or solutions. Maybe those of us who live in industrial nations should'nt breathe either, we might inhale something harmful. -
Do you know who costs more to insure? Marathon runners, triathletes. We had a triathlete and a marathon runner in my old office. We were a small firm. They both had to have knee and back surgery.
All of our rates went shooting up. The smokers didn't ever go to the doctor and so they didn't cost us a dime. -
Smoking has been given a lot of attention lately as a health risk.
It's been the # 1 cause of cancer for many years, but evidence for it as a cause of other diseses including cardiovascular disease has apppeared.
Health care systems are struggling with these diseases to prevent them and to prevent premature deaths. Everyone is still looking for answers.
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