The title of this article really caught my eye: "Lifetime medical expenditures of smokers and nonsmokers". So the question is this, do smokers spend more money on medical costs in their lifetime than non-smokers? I think that's a great question. But it's also one of those leading questions where we all think we know the answer.
So lets think about this for a second. Smokers do have a higher prevalence for disease. And not just any disease, but the big, devastating, heavy-hitters like stroke, cancer, COPD, etc. Those are fairly expensive to treat without a doubt. Plus, they have multiple admissions to hospitals and treatment centers.
But I know nonsmokers who also have strokes, cancer and heart disease. They spend a lot of money for treating those disease as well.
Hum...this is a tougher question that I previously thought. Well the researchers in Japan just happen to have a ton of data to evaluate this question objectively. Here is what they found. Their results showed that it is true, smokers did have overall higher annual medical expenditures than nonsmokers - but the smokers lifetime costs were actually slightly lower than nonsmokers. Well, how can this be?
When you look at the results a little more, you see the catch. The reason why smokers had lower cumulative lifetime medical costs is because they didn't live as long as nonsmokers. So yes, they are being devastated by diseases. They are spending tons of money in healthcare costs. They're just doing it with a smaller lifespan. This shorter life expectancy, due to the high mortality rate associated with smoking, gave them the lower medical expenditures.
So the moral of the story...a) "smoke and spend less money at the hospital" or b) "stop smoking and take better care of yourself so you will enjoy a longer more fruitful life". I don't know about you, but I'll take (b) as the right answer.
If we could just get people to stop asking the silly question, " is nicotine bad for you". It's obvious that nicotine by itself is not directly bad for you, but the result of a lifetime addicted to nicotine does have disasterous physiological and financial effects.
