The high cost of smoking

A newly released report shows the highcost of smoking, and the numbers will surprise you. Factoring in lost wages, medical care, missed opportunities to invest the money spent on cigarettes, and the costs of the cigarettes themselves, smoking costs over a smoker’s lifetime can add up to over $2 million, depending on where you live. In Oklahoma, the lifetime cost of smoking is estimated at $1.79 million.

“Smoking doesn’t just ruin your health,” the financial advice website, WalletHub, which released the study, stated. “It can also burn a nasty hole through your wallet.”

“To encourage the estimated 37.8 million tobacco users in the U.S. to kick the dangerous habit, WalletHub looked into the true per-person cost of smoking in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia,” the website explained. “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.”

Oklahoma came in at number 27, roughly in the middle. Out of pocket costs to Sooner State smokers runs $119,322, or $2,340 per year. Health care costs for a smoker in Oklahoma average $2,745 annually, or $139,985. A “smoking lifetime” of 51 years was used in deriving the estimated costs.

“Tobacco use accounts for nearly half a million deaths in the U.S. each year and is the leading cause of lung cancer, according to the American Lung Association,” WalletHub stated. “Even those around tobacco smokers aren’t safe from its harmful effects. Since 1964, smoking-related illnesses have claimed over 20 million lives in the U.S., 2.5 million of which belonged to nonsmokers who developed diseases merely from secondhand-smoke exposure.”

The website said that the economic and societal costs of smoking are just as huge, as smoking costs the U.S. more than $300 billion each year, which includes both medical care and lost productivity.

The only number in the study that is somewhat controversial is the “Financial Opportunity Cost,” which WalletHub defined as “the amount of return a person would have earned by instead investing that money in the stock market over the same period” instead of spending money on cigarettes and medical care. While the math behind the estimate may be solid, it is of course impossible to determine what a smoker would have done with the extra cash saved by kicking the habit. (La Semana)