Tobacco Decline Would Reduce Public and Private Non-Health Costs
By reducing smoking and tobacco use, an adequately-funded tobacco prevention and cessation program would reduce a range of non-healthcare costs throughout the District, such as the amount of property damage and loss from smoking-caused fires and smoking-caused cleaning and maintenance costs, which total in the billions nationwide. But the biggest non-health-cost benefit might be the impact of the smoking declines on improving worker productivity and reducing related losses.
Currently, the CDC estimates that the productivity losses in DC from productive work lives being shortened by smoking-caused death total more than $232 million each year. DC’s employers also suffer from substantial additional productivity losses caused by employees who smoke or use other tobacco products being sick more often, smoking employees taking cigarette breaks and being less productive on-the-job, and productive employees having to stop working because they are suffering from smoking-caused disease or disability. For example, one study found that smoking hurts productivity because employees who smoke are absent from work on average 6.16 days per year due to illness, whereas nonsmokers are absent on average 3.86 days per year. Similarly, a study done for the Indiana Health Department determined that the cost of smoking employees to businesses in just a single Indiana county totaled $260.1 million per year from increased absenteeism and lost productivity, higher health insurance premiums, and increased recruitment and training costs from smoking employees’ premature retirement and death.
By reducing smoking among workers, a fully-funded prevention and cessation program would cut public and private sector employer productivity losses by improving worker health and on-the-job performance, reducing the amount of smoking-caused work absences and work-time cigarette breaks, and reducing the number of productive work years lost from smoking-caused illness or disability interrupting or prematurely ending healthy and productive work lives. A healthier, more productive workforce would not only help existing city government and business employers, but would also make DC more attractive to businesses that might be considering leaving the city or other businesses the might be considering relocating to Washington, DC.
Tags: health
