You hold on, too!

:-)

Nothing increases health care costs like living longer. They then will need more knees and hips replaced, scans done, prescriptions filled, etc., etc., etc. I may be missing something, but I can't see how this could possibly reduce HC costs.

[link|http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/1031002700.html|Healthlink]:

Other recent Dartmouth studies have shown that regions with the highest health care costs actually have lower-than-average outcomes and poorer quality of care in general. With about three-quarters of total US health care costs resulting from treating the chronically ill, some may argue that we needlessly sacrifice resources on end-of-life cases that could be applied to those with the chance of brighter outcomes.

Knee replacements, etc., are expensive, but they're usually one-time things. O2 for [link|http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/emphysema.html|emphysema], etc., etc., and other chronic treatments apparently eat the bulk of the costs. Many of these illnesses and conditions are associated with smoking. Having healthier people means they have fewer chronic illnesses that need treatment, and (probably more importantly) means that they can contribute to the economy and society longer.

Cheers,
Scott.

I think perhaps you missed my premise. I'll give you emphysema (not contagious) but cancer and heart disease is just as drawn out and chronic (and expensive) for the non-smokers - after the hip and knee replacements, Lipitor, etc. A simple premise that I am working from is that, to my knowledge, no one has cured death or any of the nasty diseases that cause it. Smoking is politically charged and (like abortion), not a topic that is easily rationally debated. Let's more to a less politically charged topic.

Carrying extra weight (in some circles, the second leading preventable cause of death), if we tax the crap out of all foods/diets that cause obesity, do you think it will lower health care costs over a lifetime? There are way too many variables (with genetics being a major wildcard) to make any conclusive statements/correlations regarding actuarial certainty that costs will decrease.
To my knowledge, we don't have any truly longitudinal studies that show how many smokers who died were also overweight, heavy drinkers, highly stressed, etc. Until we can better isolate all of these variables, we may be barking up the wrong tree. To my knowledge, the only "proven" way to significantly increase lifespan (in female rodents) is a near starvation diet that slows cell division.
All in all tough to make a solid "economic" argument on fuzzy facts. Just my $.02

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