"WalletHub looked into the true per-person cost of smoking in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. We calculated the potential monetary losses — including both the lifetime and annual cost of a cigarette pack per day, health care expenditures, income losses and other costs — brought on by smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke."
The calculated lifetime cost varied from US$1.4 to 2.8 Milliion! Not that could buy quite a few years of Ibrutinib even without insurance!!
What doesn’t appear to be factored in is the increased cost of living another ten to twelve years of non smokers. Increased social security and Medicare payments for example. Non smokers also face end of life health care expenses. I certainly don’t advocate smoking; however, I would appreciate objectivity.
So are we better off as a society if we encourage everyone to engage in activities that result in a shorter life expectancy? If we have CLL and need treatment, should we just refuse treatment to spare our families and society the financial toxicity?
I expect there may be plenty of issues with how the potential monetary losses were calculated. For starters, would a couple who never smoked really be 3 to 5 million better off? (Mind, even a fraction of that would fund those extra 10 to 12 years very, very well!)
I posted this just to make us think about how we as a society look at the cost of drugs and what we readily see as an acceptable cost for an optional recreational and discretionary expense while complaining about a similar cost for what can extend our lives
The cost complaint for me is out-of-pocket costs for cancer treatment that medicare will not cover in pill form, but would cover if it were infusion which is done in a hospital clinical setting. On top of that the cost of an insurance policy called a "supplement" to medicare is not an easy pill to swallow either with the effort to cover as many bases as possible.
--and both of those are something new to me and my generation.
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