You’re making GP’s point. If you filter for just tobacco users from the general population it could very well be above a million per tobacco user.
It turns out smokers do cost more while alive, but die sooner which mostly erases the difference in medical costs. There are estimates for lost productivity amounting to 150 Billion per year in the US, but again these ignore the fact Nicotine is a stimulant.
Clearly the living have higher medical costs than the dead so some indirect savings exist. Thus, net costs are below that 170B and thus wildly off of a 500B net healthcare cost.
I don’t want to defend cigarettes which are I feel are very much a bad thing. However, I object to people misusing statistics and generally deceptive practices.
Cigarettes are bad because they kill people and cause direct suffering. The relative impact to your taxes and national GDP are irrelevant by comparison.
I agree that we should be honest with the stats, which is why I think it was disingenuous to claim that $500 billion was wildly off when the reported costs from the CDC were a substantial portion of that. Sure, we can start considering secondary effects like cost savings from people dying early and productivity lost, etc. etc. But all I'm saying is that I don't think the original claim was on its face absurd.
Agreed that we shouldn't be doing some absurd cost-benefit analysis for the economy when considering whether to combat smoking, obviously people dying is sort of a priori bad.
Also, if you object to wildly off base that’s fair. I would call even the 3x difference between the CDC’s 170B and my simplified 500B sanity check as wildly off base. But, that’s just my scale +/- 50% is fine, 2x raises read flags for me, but out at 3+x is a fundamental incompatibility in different estimates.
Remove cigs, replace them with vapes. Presumably the effect is the same, but the vapers live slightly longer than they would've if they were smokers.
I would be surprised if the stimulating effects outstripped the dying early effects.
edit: just did a brief search and apparently on aggregate former smokers who quit have increased productivity following quitting, so even while smoking there is decreased productivity effects
$5T would be "wildly off"...
And you must concede that even "only" a $170B reduction in medical costs could change the entire market.
It may cost 20$ to eat out at lunch, but the alternative is not skipping eating. So the net cost for eating out is the delta between my options.
Random study: Results Smoking was associated with a greater mean annual healthcare cost of €1600 per living individual during follow-up. However, due to a shorter lifespan of 8.6 years, smokers’ mean total healthcare costs during the entire study period were actually €4700 lower than for non-smokers. For the same reason, each smoker missed 7.3 years (€126 850) of pension. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/6/e001678.
Considering how most vape products seem to be made on a shoestring in some factory in China, I think CDC and the FDA should be throwing enormous amounts of money into building high quality, super effective vape products.
And nicotine has this weird reputation as being dangerous, but beyond addictiveness it has not be shown to be harmful, even potentially neuroprotective. Not to mention scaremongers tend to ignore that it is a stimulant, and can help with anxiety. Schizos are known to self medicate with it, for example.
Yeah, but your source also says that vaping rates are up, outstripping any decreases in smoking rates.
>It showed that 27.5% of high schoolers had vaped in the past 30 days in 2019, up from 20.8% the year before. Meanwhile, teen cigarette-smoking rates dropped from 8.1% to 5.8% in the same time period.
This seems to support what the parent post is saying:
> E.g. instead of fewer people having very expensive cancer care, vaping could still cause some damage and incur costs across more people.
Agreed that is a completely different problem than smoking, but still worth discussing since it is so addictive.
What i often seen is the number of teens who have vaped in the last year compared to habitual smokers
Do you know how long smoking was around before we had actual evidence that it was harmful?
(Hint: The rough order of magnitude of the time is centuries.)
Case studies can't spot harm faster than the harm occurs. The main harm from smoking is a significantly increased risk of lung cancer and other illnesses which can take decades to show up. That's why even with modern medicine advancing over the last century it took so long to nail down the health risks of smoking.
I used to smoke, and now I vape. My lungs function so much better now that it’s easily discernible to me that smoking irritates lungs far more than vaping.
Now, you could argue that there's little evidence of nicotine being harmful aside from being highly addictive (although even then there would be an economic argument to be made), but if there is any harm, the addictive nature will make sure that harm is long-lasting.
Modern laboratory science is no help in figuring out fast whether vaping is harmful, because we don't understand how the human body works well enough to do laboratory tests that will tell us. So we're reduced to basically what we used to show that smoking was harmful: long-term data collection and analysis.
> My lungs function so much better now that it’s easily discernible to me that smoking irritates lungs far more than vaping.
Saying that vaping is less harmful than smoking (which is probably true) is a much weaker statement than saying that there's zero indication that vaping is harmful, so there's no reason to worry about it, which is the claim I was responding to.
I can't tell if media is ruining society or if society has ruined media.
I suppose you could make a case that it's not that bad, or that it'll not happen again, or that patrons of brightly-lit stores have lower risks.
Instead, you're making a case that this proves the safety of all vaping products not tainted with this specific ingredient. That was not very convincing.
I certainly don't.
So yeah, I break 10k (for a family) before anyone even gets to visit a doc. Where they slap you with extra $$$ on anything.
We should mandate that everyone has to pay for their own health insurance (e.g. healthcare). Put a full stop on employer provided health plans. And have people actually pay from their hard earned $ to the health providers for the right to show up. Now for a lot of people who get benefits through employment, the absurdity of the cost isn’t visible enough to actually care / do something about the situation.
And then I had an operation this year (unrelated to the diabetes.... kind of), so that adds another 10,000$, give or take.
$832.21 X 12 -> $9986.52
If one in 10 people is over 70 and some others get serious or chronic illnesses earlier in life, the mean cost per person could easily be much higher than the median cost per person.
The mean can be calculated from the total: just divide by the population. That’s what the commenter to whom you replied did. The total was probably easy to estimate, as the largest healthcare providers’ revenues are in their public filings.
Calculating the median requires individual data. That is much harder to get because, in many cases, no one except the patient has the data.
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
And insurance is just insurance. out of pocket maximum is usually $10k+, so if you do need care, add that to premiums.
Like I could see something happening in a year, but not every year.
I don't know what the real number is. There are plenty of studies showing it's negative, mostly funded by tobacco companies. That might not quite be true, but it's not far off: a non-smoker who lives to 90 has similar levels of health issues in his last 5 years as a smoker who dies at 65.
Reducing smoking would be a huge public good, but the benefit mostly accrues to the smoker, not to the state. We don't need to pretend it's otherwise for these campaigns to make sense.