Study Puts Smoking’s Medical Bill at $50 Billion
Smokers burn up about $50 billion a year in direct medical costs associated with cigarettes, or about $2 a pack, according to a study by UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco researchers and federal scientists.
The figures, announced Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are nearly double the size of the medical bill attributed to smoking in previous CDC studies, but confirm more recent, informal data.
“It’s staggering,” said John Bloom of the Coalition on Smoking OR Health. “It shows that tobacco is as harmful to the economy as it is to health.”
Bloom’s group, a coalition of the American Heart Assn., the American Lung Assn. and the American Cancer Society, is seeking a $2-a-pack increase in the federal tobacco tax. The tax is now 24 cents.
The researchers analyzed the recently released National Medical Expenditures Survey of 1987-88, which tracked the health expenses of 35,000 Americans.
Based on that data, the team estimated that in 1993, smoking cost $50 billion in medical care, with $26.9 billion--54%--spent on hospitalization alone.
Taxpayers footed 43%--89 cents a pack or $21.6 billion--of the total bill, the researchers said.
For each of the 24 billion packs of cigarettes sold last year, about $2.06 was spent directly on medical care associated with smoking, the report said.
A spokesman for the Tobacco Institute, Thomas Lauria, cited earlier studies, including one from the CDC, that found far lower medical costs associated with smoking. He noted that the nation’s 48 million adult smokers already pay an average of 56 cents a pack in state and federal taxes.
“Smokers are not only paying their own way, but they add to the public coffers,” Lauria said. “We stand by our conviction that those costs do not exceed the taxes collected on the product.”
CDC medical epidemiologist Dr. Thomas Novotny, assistant dean of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, countered: “Smokers do pay taxes, but the economic burden is shared by more than just smokers.”
