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The Cost Of Smoking
People give all kinds of reasons for why they started smoking,but none of them are good — not even supposedly altruistic ones.
While some claim that you’re actually saving our overburdened healthcare system money in thelong run by smoking because it reduces life expectancy, it’s nowhere near a watertight argument.
First of all, you’re certainly not doing your family and friends a favor by deliberately lowering yourlife expectancy. In fact, your family will have to absorb the losses incurred when you miss workdue to smoking-related illnesses. Second, there is a lot of debate over the best way to measurethe economic costs of smoking.
Every study is based on different assumptions, and uses different data and methods. For example,should you measure the cost of smoking by looking at the cost of treating major illnesses like lungcancer and heart disease, or should you also measure the cost of less serious illnesses? Should youtake into account the fact that people who live longer also pay more taxes and insurancepremiums? Should you look at the overall cost to the healthcare system, or at the cost perindividual?
Anyway, regardless of how you calculate them, the economic costs of smoking areinconsequential when compared to smoking’s real price: the misery caused by the deaths of over400,000 people each year and the illnesses of several million.
