Smoking

5 Pages 1315 Words

• Nearly one out of every four Medicare dollars spent on hospital care is due to substance abuse -- totalling $20 billion out of the $87 billion spent on such care in fiscal year 1994. Eighty percent of that -- $16 billion -- paid for care for smoking-related disease and disabilities.
• Cigarette smoking is the largest single drain on the Medicare Trust Fund, poised to take $800 billion over the next 20 years, according to a study of hospital records and epidemiological studies.
• Only 11 percent of those polled said they felt tobacco companies told the entire truth about health issues. Forty-five percent said they felt they were mostly truthful but were hiding something, and 38 percent said the companies were mostly lying.

• In 1990, 7,993 deaths in Washington state were tobacco-related. This is compared to 3,024 deaths caused by automobile accidents, suicides, alcohol, AIDS, drugs, homicides, and fires combined.
• Lung Cancer is the state's leading cause of cancer deaths for both men and women. In 1988, over 81 percent - 1,984 of the total 2,444 lung cancer deaths were caused by cigarette smoking.
• In 1988, Washington state citizens had an estimated 1,374,419 days of disability due to smoking-attributable disease, costing $101.3 million.

• In 1988, direct medical care for smoking-attributable disease in Washington cost an estimated $263.9 million.

• The total economic impact of smoking-related illness and death in Washington state for 1988 is estimated between $760.4 million and 924.4 million.
• The direct medical costs associated with smoking totaled $50 billion in 1993. For each of the 24 billion packs of cigarettes sold in the U.S. in 1993, $2.00 was spent on avoidable health-care costs due to smoking.

• Smoking is responsible for an estimated 7 percent of total U.S. health-care costs.

• Federal and state funds pay more than 43 percent of all smoking-attributable m...