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California Tobacco Control Program Saved Billions in Medical Costs

Program prevented 3.6 billion packs of cigarettes from being smoked

August 29, 2008

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Kicking the habit really does make good economic sense, and researchers at University of California, San Francisco have the numbers to back it up.

Their study found that California's state tobacco control program saved $86 billion -- in 2004 dollars -- in personal healthcare costs in its first 15 years. During the same period, the state spent a total of just $1.8 billion on the program, a 50-to-1 return on investment, according to study findings. The study is the first that has been able to quantifiably connect tobacco control to healthcare savings, say its authors.

The healthcare savings occurred because the program prevented 3.6 billion packs of cigarettes -- worth $9.2 billion to the tobacco industry -- from being smoked between 1989, when the state-funded California Tobacco Control Program began, and 2004, when this study ended.

"The benefits of the program accrued very quickly and are very large," said Stanton Glantz, PhD, senior author on the paper and director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

Glantz, a UCSF professor of medicine, says the reason that the California program had such large and rapid benefits in terms of health care costs was the fact that it is directed at adults, not youth.

"When adults stop smoking, you see immediate benefits in heart disease, with impacts on cancer and lung diseases starting to appear a year or two later," he said.

The study, published in the Aug. 25, 2008 online issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, found evidence of health cost reductions in the first year after the start of the California program, which focused on adults and social norm change, rather than the more common approach of focusing on adolescent use prevention.

These cost savings also occurred despite a substantial diversion of funding during the mid-1990s and the fact that inflation has eroded the purchasing power of the five-cent per pack cigarette tax that funds the program.

The researchers estimate that if the funding had been maintained at the same level of intensity as in the program's early years ($4.76 per capita, about $80 million per year), total health care cost savings over 15 years would have increased from $86 billion to $156 billion.

Large state tobacco control programs have previously been shown to reduce smoking, heart attacks and cancer, Glantz says, but this is the first time researchers have been able to quantify the effects on health costs.

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