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A comment on Medicaid Could Save $2.6B Within a Year If Just 1% of Recipients Quit Smoking. Parent comment

Re:Medicaid Could Save $2.6B Within a Year If Just 1% of Rec... by phoronixrly on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @02:36PM (#36867219)
How about how much tax money will be gained from having alive and healthy people earning money and paying taxes? I bet it's going to be more than whatever cigarette tax will be lost...
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Re:Medicaid Could Save $2.6B Within a Year If Just 1% of Rec... by ComputerGuru on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @02:37PM (#36867255)
Not if the smoking cohort is concentrated in older, retired members of the population.
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Re:Medicaid Could Save $2.6B Within a Year If Just 1% of Rec... by jeffbee on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @02:47PM (#36867422)
It's not. Smoking among those over 65 has always been relatively rare. It used to be that the highest rates were among those under 30 but those younger adults today don't want tobacco and the current largest cohort of smokers is middle-aged. Less than 10% of over-65 Americans smoke tobacco according to various surveys.
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Re:Medicaid Could Save $2.6B Within a Year If Just 1% of Rec... by phoronixrly on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @02:57PM (#36867591)
Look around you, do you see only old sick people smoking? Also at this study (for Spain):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6813084/

> Deaths due to lung cancer represented the 28.90% and the 10.83% of all cancer-related deaths in 2017 in males and females respectively, with an increasing tendency in this last group. In addition, the YPPLL count increased in the study period among females. Lung cancer was responsible annually for 60,846 YPPLL, and productivity losses summed €13.1 billion over the 10 year period.

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Re:Medicaid Could Save $2.6B Within a Year If Just 1% of Rec... by lostlogin on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @02:55PM (#36867565)
In New Zealand we tax tobacco heavily. It is thought that smokers save the government money - they pay a lot of tax and die early.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/smokers-save-govt-cash-says-re...

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Re:Medicaid Could Save $2.6B Within a Year If Just 1% of Rec... by dingi on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @11:15AM (#36879096)
This is true for my country as well. Govt taxes cigarettes around 1000%. I'm not kidding, that's a thousand percent tax. Our govt essentially runs on smokers and drinkers tax money.
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