IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v17y1983i23p1907-1914.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does smoking increase medical care expenditure?

Author

Listed:
  • Leu, Robert E.
  • Schaub, Thomas

Abstract

The impact of smoking on medical care expenditure is analyzed, challenging the widespread belief that smoking imposes a large cost burden on health services systems. The results imply that lifetime expenditure is higher for nonsmokers than for smokers because smokers' higher annual utilization rates are overcompensated for by nonsmokers' higher life expectancy. Population simulation, taking into account the effects of past smoking on present population size and composition, suggests that 1976 expenditure would have been the same if no male born since 1876 had ever smoked. The male population would have been larger, particularly at older ages, increasing medical care expenditure, but this increase would have been offset by lower annual medical care utilization rates. Thus the results imply that smoking does not increase medical care expenditure and, therefore, reducing smoking is unlikely to decrease it.

Suggested Citation

  • Leu, Robert E. & Schaub, Thomas, 1983. "Does smoking increase medical care expenditure?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 17(23), pages 1907-1914, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:17:y:1983:i:23:p:1907-1914
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(83)90168-5
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hayashida, Kenshi & Imanaka, Yuichi & Murakami, Genki & Takahashi, Yuko & Nagai, Masato & Kuriyama, Shinichi & Tsuji, Ichiro, 2010. "Difference in lifetime medical expenditures between male smokers and non-smokers," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 94(1), pages 84-89, January.
    2. Auerbach, Alan J. & Chun, Young Jun, 2006. "Generational accounting in Korea," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 20(2), pages 234-268, June.
    3. Kenkel, Donald S. & Manning, Willard, 1999. "Economic evaluation of nutrition policy: Or, there's no such thing as a free lunch," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 24(2-3), pages 145-162, May.
    4. Betty Tao & Massimo Pietropaolo & Mark Atkinson & Desmond Schatz & David Taylor, 2010. "Estimating the Cost of Type 1 Diabetes in the U.S.: A Propensity Score Matching Method," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(7), pages 1-11, July.
    5. Herbert J A Rolden & David van Bodegom & Rudi G J Westendorp, 2014. "Changes in Health Care Expenditure after the Loss of a Spouse: Data on 6,487 Older Widows and Widowers in the Netherlands," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(12), pages 1-17, December.
    6. Laurie J. Bates & Resul Cesur & Rexford E. Santerre, 2015. "Short‐run marginal medical costs from booze and butts: Evidence from the states," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 81(4), pages 1074-1095, April.
    7. Armineh Zohrabian & Tomas J Philipson, 2010. "External Costs of Risky Health Behaviors Associated with Leading Actual Causes of Death in the U.S.: A Review of the Evidence and Implications for Future Research," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 7(6), pages 1-13, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:17:y:1983:i:23:p:1907-1914. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.