Lawmakers Reduced Funding for Anti-smoking Programs

We are passed about smoking, unemployment and national health therefore this support became one of our most important in 2010.
Now we are coming with a brand new health care law, for the first time, since 1960, smoking rates are raising. You may ask, why?

• First of all, because legislators are tacking away money from smoking cessation programs.
• 85% of the health insurance policies do not cover smoking cessation treatment.
• Big Tobacco is still extremely rich, as it spends about $25 million per day on promoting its tobacco products and thus attracting new smokers. And it continues to have a certain influence on politicians everywhere.

And the result of all these are: sicker people and sluggish economy. Fewer workplaces, weakly productivity and consequently a great budget shortfall.

You probably wonder how smoking can increase unemployment or the state debt. There are two ways: First one, smoking influences greatly worker’s productivity with a lot of cigarette breaks. Second, state and federal governments are spending milliards of dollars to cure serious diseases related to tobacco smoke.

Only imagine what would happen if those milliards of dollars were spent on creating new workplaces and, maybe on cutting-down the state debt.

Do not believe politicians who state that tobacco taxes cover all these losses. You would have to pay more than $10 per pack in order to break even.

This year the majority of states will obtain approximately $162 million from the settlement fund, yet spend an average of $202 million on treatment of tobacco-related illnesses. About $40 million per state or $2 billion in total.

We are spending more than $170.3 billion on tobacco damage this is more than we are accumulating in tobacco taxes. And that usually leads to budget deficit. Can we really permit to have smoking-cessation programs in a recession? We must fund them, because they save lives of our people and also save money. For example,

• When Massachusetts paid the full cost to Medicaid for smoking cessation programs, quit rates doubled and the number of smokers dropped by 26%. Only within two years patients with asthma attacks dropped by 17% and hospitalizations for heart attacks fall 38 %.
• Also when companies help their employees to stop smoking, they economize approximately $542 per each former smoker for a year health insurance allowance.
• When smoking was prohibited in workplaces and other venues, hospitalization for heart attack fall by 27%.

Recently such states as Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Pennsylvania completely funded Medicaid quit-smoking programs and the payoffs are significant.

At present medicine knows how to win this dangerous habit, by using special combination of nicotine-replacement products in order to overcome the psychological barrier.

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