California's Tobacco Control Program has saved lives and health care costs with its effective policies to control and prevent tobacco use over the past two decades, reports Medical Xpress.
A new study from the UC San Francisco (UCSF) estimated that California's Tobacco Control Program saved over $ 134 billion in health care costs over the last 20 years. The program spend was $2.4 billion. The study covered the period 1989-2008. The program was successful in reducing 6.8 billion packets of cigarettes sale worth $28.5 billion to the cigarette companies.
The new study clearly shows that the tobacco control funding is linked to reductions in prevalence of smoking and cigarette consumption per smoker and extensively saves the health care costs, reports the Medical Xpress.
"These health care cost savings began to appear almost immediately after the program started and have grown over time, reaching more than $25 billion a year in 2008," said first author James Lightwood, PhD, a UCSF associate professor of clinical pharmacy.
Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that more than 443,000 people die due to direct smoking or second hand smoking in the United States of America. An additional 8.6 million people suffer from serious smoking related disorders. CDC also notes that 5.1 million years of life is lost in the U.S. due to smoking and billions are spent towards health care.
People in California voted to pass the Proposition 99 in 1988, which focused on tobacco control along with lowering health costs. During the study, researchers compared the cumulative per capita tobacco control funding and both smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption per smoker. They found that every $100 spent helped in reducing smoking prevalence by 5 percent and cigarette consumption per smoker by 139 packs annually, says the report.
"Our research shows that large-scale aggressive tobacco control programs not only save lives, but make an important contribution to health care cost containment," said senior author Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, a UCSF professor of medicine and director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, reports Medical Xpress.
"The results show that the California tobacco control program had a substantial effect on both smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption per smoker, and both in turn had a substantial effect on per capita health care expenditures," the study concluded.
The study is published in an online journal PLOS ONE.
