Smoking and Health Care Costs

We all know that tobacco kills people.  It destroys their heart health and ravages the body with cancer.  These are not debatable facts.  Yet tobacco remains fairly popular, with a median usage rate of 18.1% among adults (CDC data below). That's even more popular than Shards O' Glass!

According to a recent study in Ohio:

Each 1 percent decline in smoking rates would save the state $838 million in health care costs, including $148.5 million in state Medicaid costs

Let that really sink in for a minute -- we could save literally billions and billions of dollars in health care costs annually by reducing the number of smokers nationally by a few percentage points.  What's the most reliable way to reduce smoking rates?  Raise taxes on them.

The CDC released updated figures on state-by-state smoking rates and smokeless tobacco usage rates:

Unsurprisingly to me, Kentucky and West Virginia topped the list of smokers, at 25.6%.  From my own anecdotal experience, I have noticed how high the rates are in eastern KY and southern WV (as well as southwestern VA).  Over one in four adults smoke there.  In addition, 6.7% and 8.5% of adults there use smokeless tobacco, respectively.  That means that over 30% of Kentuckians and West Virginians are regular tobacco users.  How many billions of dollars in health care costs could those states save by raising taxes on tobacco products?

And it may be even worse than that:

The findings in this report are subject to at least three limitations. First, BRFSS does not include adults without telephone service (1.7%) or with wireless-only service (24.5%), and adults with wireless-only service are twice as likely to smoke cigarettes as the rest of the U.S. population (9). Because wireless-only service varies by state (9), these data likely underestimate the actual prevalence of cigarette smoking in some states and might underestimate smokeless tobacco use.

So basically it could be as high as 40% in those states...

I looked up the tax rates on tobacco there and the taxes there (KY and WV) are well below the national average, although still lower than in neighboring Virginia:

So at the end of the day, the states with the highest usage of tobacco have some of the lowest tax rates.  This despite the fact that it has been known for some time that the costs of smoking are largely borne by society (non-smokers) via higher health costs.  While states are scrambling to lay off teachers and police in order to balance their budgets, perhaps the first order of business would be to cut spending on health care, raise revenues and increase people's quality of life with one simple action:  raise tobacco taxes.