I'm surprised that so many people fall for the health care expenses myth. It is propaganda pure and simple. The anti-smoking movement has plenty of good, factual evidence for its case, and no need whatever to make up lies, and yet the witch-hunting mania this last decade or two is such that this one is almost never challenged. And yet, as soon as you subject the figures to rational analysis, it becomes apparent that they are pure hokum. Complete rubbish.
The fundamental, and quite gross, error in the "smoking costs the community a lot of money via the health care budget" lie is simple: it calculates the health care costs for the average smoker and fails to calculate the opportunity cost. The concept of opportunity cost is one of the most fundamental parts of economics. There are two costs involved with building a freeway, for example. The first cost is the up-front cost: the price of the land, the concrete, the wages for the guy who drives the bulldozer, and so on. The second cost is the cost of whatever it was that was forgone in order to build the road. (Using the land to grow crops on, building a railway, a park, whatever.) When you buy a new car, the up-front cost is the $30,000 on the price-sticker, the opportunity cost is the other thing you didn't do with the money - pay off your mortgage, invest in some superannuation, whatever.
Once you obey the rules of economics and calculate the total health care costs of smoking to the community, it becomes clear that the "smokers cost us a lot of money" arguement is utterly worthless.
It is easy to tot up health care costs for smokers, and easy to show that these costs are truly enormous. But they are dwarfed by the health care costs of non-smokers. (I'm assuming here that the average smoker dies relatively young of a smoking-related illness, and that the average non-smoker lives to a ripe old age. In reality, of course, these are merely statistical probabilities, and this generalisation is only true on a whole-of-population basis. There are pleny of individual exceptions. These do not, however, invalidate the overall rule.)
As compared with non-smokers, smokers tend to die younger and die more rapidly. The cost of caring for 55 year old cancer victim during a three year illness is indeed enormous. But it is small indeed by comparison with that person's twin brother who does not smoke and lives to be 75 before he eventually dies of some other cause. On average, the longer someone lives, the more they cost the community. Most smokers live long enough to complete their working lives, pay their fair share of income taxes, make their contribution to society. But (on average) they die while still relatively young, and of a relatively simple combination of conditions.
Non-smokers, on the other hand, also tend to live long enugh to pay their full share of income taxes and retire at the statutory age, but then go on living for a considerably longer time, gradually decaying and costing the community more and more as the years go by. And the older they get (on average) the more expensive it becomes to care for them. Much of this care is, of course, paid for by their families - if you add in the countless hours involved in caring for an elderly and infirm loved one as if you were paying someone to do it for you (which is the correct way to calculate anything in economic terms), the cost is astronomical. Ever tried looking after someone with Alzhiemers? Elderly people gradually fade away, making ever more frequent trips to the hospital, and health care for them in their final years is terribly, terribly difficult (read expensive) because every time you (say) perform a small operation, you have a severe risk of introducing complications. The whole body is frail, and anything invasive is liable to set off a whole series of side effects which must be dealt with in turn. From the cold-hearted point of view of an economist, it would be much cheaper to have them die relatively rapidly of lung cancer or something similar at an earlier age. It would be conveinient, economically speaking, if they were to pop off toward the end of, or shortly after their productive working lives. It would be most cost-effective, in other words, if they all smoked.
I don't mind it if people say how much they dislike smoking (I have been known to not smoke for years at a time myself), nor if people bring up sensible, logical reasons to oppose it. But I get really pissed off when otherwise intelligent people fail to examine the claims made in the media and fall hook, line and sinker for such an obvious lie.
If the anti-smoking movement wants to get serious and actually persuade anyone with enough intelligence to balance a chequebook, then the first thing it has to do is put its own house in order and start getting its facts straight, start examining its propaganda and throwing out (however reluctantly) the obvious untruths. The net effect of the health care cost lie is to demonstrate to anyone of moderate intelligence that the anti-smoking lobby is no more to be trusted as a source of reliable information than the Rothmans publicity department, or the Phillip Morris marketing newsletter.
If you want to be believed, then you have to tell the truth all the time.
