Over the last 20 years, California’s tobacco control program cost $2.4 billion – that is real money – but it reduced health care costs by $134 billion in pretend money, according to a new estimate from the director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.
They use the estimate that every year an estimated 443,000 people in the United States die from smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – the problem is there is not a single death that can really be attributed to second-hand smoke and even first-hand smoke is fuzzy. Half of lung cancer patients never smoked and only 10 percent of smokers get lung cancer so trying to broaden the pool by making all those deaths due to cigarettes is more agenda than data.
Exactly what we have been saying for years.
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