Spotlight: Smoking-Linked Illnesses Cost $72.7 Billion in 1993

Cigarette smoking led to total U.S. medical costs of $72.7 billion in 1993, according to estimates by UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco researchers. They tallied the number of recorded medical incidents in each state that may be linked to smoking. Then they assigned a price to each incident and computed the total dollar cost. It estimated that 11.1% of all health-care dollars went to treating smoking-linked problems. California residents spent $8.7 billion on smoking-related costs, the study estimated.