Want to lower health care costs? It’s very simple — don’t smoke.

Massachusetts initiated a Medicaid tobacco treatment coverage plan that saved the state $3 for every $1 invested.

If just 10 percent of American smokers kicked the habit, and another group of people cut back by 10 percent, the U.S. could shave $63 billion off medical costs in the next year, a new analysis has found.

“You start to see the benefits quickly, and they’re huge because health care costs are so gigantic,” Dr. Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a statement. The study is the first to estimate cost savings within a year of smoking reductions.

Some 18 percent of U.S. adults still smoke, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.

Glantz’s evaluation, which appeared in PLOS Medicine, looked at all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The study found that regions of the country with lower smoking rates had substantially lower medical costs from 1992 through 2009.

Why People Finally Quit
Costs and health concerns are among the many reasons people finally kick the habit, Dr. Michael Steinberg, director of the Rutgers Tobacco Dependence Program in New Jersey, said.

While higher tobacco prices have been an incentive for people to quit, price alone is not the answer, he added.

“Some people don’t want to feel addicted or under the control of their cigarettes anymore,” said Steinberg.

[lz_bulleted_list title=”It’s Quittin’ Time” source=”American Cancer Society”]Every 10 percent increase in prices reduces cigarette consumption by about 4 percent.|Nearly 70 percent of smokers want to quit.|It takes five to seven attempts at quitting to be successful.[/lz_bulleted_list]

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“Many people quit when they finally get sick enough to realize the negative health impact it has on them,” Dr. Wendy Max, a health economics professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said.

In February 2009, President Obama passed the largest federal tax increase ever on tobacco — it more than doubled the tax on a pack of cigarettes, from $0.39 per pack to $1.01 per pack. Revenues went up soon after, but since 2010, they have declined, the Tax Foundation reports.

Individual states have passed some tax hikes of their own on tobacco products, but tobacco companies do what they can to resist any additional increases, said Cathy Callaway, associate director of state and local campaigns for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. She said they know the higher taxes hurt their bottom line.

The average state cigarette tax is $1.60 per pack; rates vary from 17 cents in Missouri to $4.35 in New York, the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids reports.

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Revenue Distribution
Wondering where the money from the federal cigarette tax goes? Once given to the states — that depends. The revenues should be used for tobacco-control efforts, Max said, but that is seldom the case.

“States often increase cigarette taxes and then fail to use the additional revenue to help those very smokers who pay the tax in their quit attempt,” Steinberg said. “This is unconscionable.”

The federal tobacco tax money goes to different sources and is not earmarked exclusively for tobacco cessation, said Dr. Jason Hockenberry, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Emory University. Advocacy groups have been pitching tobacco taxes as a revenue source instead of framing it as a health and social issue, Hockenberry said.

“Only in the face of political cowardice can these types of [cessation] efforts not be supported.”

“If the goal is to get people to stop using tobacco because it would save health care dollars, then by definition the policy should not result in a reliable revenue source, because smoking prevalence should be dropping,” he said.

Funding Pays Off
Steinberg noted that Massachusetts initiated a Medicaid tobacco treatment coverage plan that saved the state $3 for every $1 invested in tobacco treatment. “This return on investment cannot be ignored,” Steinberg said. “Only in the face of political cowardice can these types of efforts not be supported.”

He said he hopes more findings such as those in Stanton’s study convince lawmakers to fund tobacco treatment “in the name of what’s best for their citizens as well as to save money.”

Over time, could health care costs actually decrease if more people kick the habit — or never start to begin with? Dr. Jeffrey Drope, vice president of economic and health policy research at the American Cancer Society, told LifeZette that it has the potential to drive health care costs down.

That, of course, assumes that the health insurance companies pass the savings onto consumers, he added.