Life /
Smokers in Poland..... price rise. [47]
Quote from: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/background_briefings/smoking/86599.stm
It is assumed that if large numbers of smokers give up, the NHS will make substantial savings.
This is not necessarily the case. Dutch researchers have shown smokers may actually save society money because they do not live so long. The study, conducted by the Erasmus University Department of Public Health in Rotterdam, compared the health care costs of smokers to those of people of more advanced years.
They concluded that in the long run, if many people stopped using tobacco products, costs would actually rise as a healthier population eventually moved into nursing homes and into the relatively expensive diseases of old age.
They calculated the average lifetime costs of a smoking man to be $72,700 - much less than $83,400 for the non-smoking man.