[Red Potato Standing By]

Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist

Wrong. Very, very, very wrong. Smokers live with lots of expensive diseases for a long time before dying of copd out cancer. Smoking adds 10's to 100's of thousands of extra dollars to the health care system per person before these people die.

What you aren't including here is that smokers have much higher rates of:

-Cancer (almost all kinds). Remember that most people live long after a diagnosis of cancer, many even cured. Most people do not sure of the cancer they are diagnosed with. It is incredibly expensive to treat these cancers.
-Copd. Many, many years of puffers, ER visits due to AECOPD and the antibiotics to treat them. Diagnostic tests, Dr visitant, respiratory therapy, etc
-Hospitalizations due to the much higher rates of severe pneumonia
-much higher rates of cardiovascular disease and the treatments/surgeries to prevent them
-home visits for when the copd patient is no longer mobile
-oxygen therapy is very expensive
-microvascular complications leading to infections, etc are much more common as well and they need to be treated. One of the major risk factors for amputation
-Cataracts. One of the biggest risk factors is smoking. Removal is very expensive
-vision. Smokers are 4 times as likely to be blind in old age. There are many significant costs associated with varying for the blind
-lots and lots more


When you smoke, you're essentially inhaling little bombs (oxygen free radicals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons). Most of these bombs go off in the lungs and damage the tissue there, but many are carried around the body by the blood stream only to damage tissues and cause cancer elsewhere. It really affects everything.


We aren't simply exchanging one death for another here. The issue is that the life of a smoker is much, much more expensive for all of us than simply their death.

wouldn't the solution then be to tax the smokers more then non-smokers then the extra cost would be covered?