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Study says if Ky. decreased its smoking rate to the national average, it could save $1.7 billion in health-care costs the next year - Health News
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By Melissa Patrick
Kentucky Health News
If Kentucky could cut its smoking rate to the national average, it would save an estimated $1.7 billion on health care the following year, a study says.
Kentucky's smoking rate is 26 percent, and the national average is 18 percent.
The study at the University of California-San Francisco estimates that a 10 percent decline in the national rate would save $63 billion a year in health-care costs.
It also found that smoking makes Kentucky spend $399 more per person per year on health care than it would if the state's rate equaled the national rate. That was the highest figure of any state.
Conversely, low rates of smoking save Utah and California, respectively, $465 and $416 per person per year compared to what they would spend if their smoking rates were the national rate.
“Regions that have implemented public policies to reduce smoking have substantially lower medical costs,” said the authors. “Likewise, those that have failed to implement tobacco control policies have higher medical costs.”
The study, published in PLOS Medicine, looked at health-care spending in each state and the District of Columbia from 1992 to 2009, and measured the year-to-year relationship between changes in smoking behavior and changes in medical costs.
Many studies have shown that smoking bans and other smoke-free policies decrease smoking rates, reduce smoking prevalence among workers and the general population, and keep youth from starting to smoke.
That has been one of the arguments for a statewide smoking ban, but efforts to pass one have stalled because new Republican Gov. Matt Bevin opposes a statewide ban and says smoke-free policies should be a local decision.
Bevin won big budget cuts from the legislature to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars for shoring up the state's pension systems, but the study hasn't made the administration look at a smoking ban as a source of savings.
Doug Hogan, acting communications director for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, said in an e-mail, "It appears this research, which highlights the impact of the local ordinance in Lexington, strengthens the case that smoking bans are a local issue, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution."
However, Hogan said that the cabinet is committed to helping people quit smoking: "Education and proper policy incentives are critical tools that the state can use and as our commonwealth crafts its Medicaid wavier, it is looking very closely at ways to best incentivize smoking cessation to improve health and decrease cost to the commonwealth."
Other possible tobacco-control measures include raising cigarette taxes, anti-smoking advertising campaigns and better access to smoking-cessation programs.
Money for these programs could come from cigarette manufacturers, under their 1998 tobacco settlement with states. The latest annual report on the subject from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Kentucky spends less than 8 percent of what it should on preventing tobacco use.
The study points out that significant health-care savings could occur so quickly because the risks for smoke-related diseases decreases rapidly once a smoker quits.
"For example, the risk of heart attack and stroke drop by approximately half in the first year after the smoker quits, and the risk of having a low-birth-weight infant due to smoking almost entirely disappears if a pregnant woman quits smoking during the first trimester," says the report.
"These findings show that state and national policies that reduce smoking not only will improve health, but can be a key part of health care cost containment even in the short run," co-author Stanton Glantz, director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, said in the release.
Kentucky Health News
If Kentucky could cut its smoking rate to the national average, it would save an estimated $1.7 billion on health care the following year, a study says.
Kentucky's smoking rate is 26 percent, and the national average is 18 percent.
The study at the University of California-San Francisco estimates that a 10 percent decline in the national rate would save $63 billion a year in health-care costs.
It also found that smoking makes Kentucky spend $399 more per person per year on health care than it would if the state's rate equaled the national rate. That was the highest figure of any state.
Conversely, low rates of smoking save Utah and California, respectively, $465 and $416 per person per year compared to what they would spend if their smoking rates were the national rate.
“Regions that have implemented public policies to reduce smoking have substantially lower medical costs,” said the authors. “Likewise, those that have failed to implement tobacco control policies have higher medical costs.”
The study, published in PLOS Medicine, looked at health-care spending in each state and the District of Columbia from 1992 to 2009, and measured the year-to-year relationship between changes in smoking behavior and changes in medical costs.
Many studies have shown that smoking bans and other smoke-free policies decrease smoking rates, reduce smoking prevalence among workers and the general population, and keep youth from starting to smoke.
That has been one of the arguments for a statewide smoking ban, but efforts to pass one have stalled because new Republican Gov. Matt Bevin opposes a statewide ban and says smoke-free policies should be a local decision.
Bevin won big budget cuts from the legislature to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars for shoring up the state's pension systems, but the study hasn't made the administration look at a smoking ban as a source of savings.
Doug Hogan, acting communications director for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, said in an e-mail, "It appears this research, which highlights the impact of the local ordinance in Lexington, strengthens the case that smoking bans are a local issue, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution."
However, Hogan said that the cabinet is committed to helping people quit smoking: "Education and proper policy incentives are critical tools that the state can use and as our commonwealth crafts its Medicaid wavier, it is looking very closely at ways to best incentivize smoking cessation to improve health and decrease cost to the commonwealth."
Other possible tobacco-control measures include raising cigarette taxes, anti-smoking advertising campaigns and better access to smoking-cessation programs.
Money for these programs could come from cigarette manufacturers, under their 1998 tobacco settlement with states. The latest annual report on the subject from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Kentucky spends less than 8 percent of what it should on preventing tobacco use.
The study points out that significant health-care savings could occur so quickly because the risks for smoke-related diseases decreases rapidly once a smoker quits.
"For example, the risk of heart attack and stroke drop by approximately half in the first year after the smoker quits, and the risk of having a low-birth-weight infant due to smoking almost entirely disappears if a pregnant woman quits smoking during the first trimester," says the report.
"These findings show that state and national policies that reduce smoking not only will improve health, but can be a key part of health care cost containment even in the short run," co-author Stanton Glantz, director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, said in the release.
from Kentucky Health News http://ift.tt/1sI8DSO - Health News
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