As any smoker can tell you, smoking is an expensive habit. In addition to the obvious costs, such as the cigarettes themselves, there are other costs. In the long term, you’re going to need more medical care if you smoke, for example. Smoking is even a factor in driving up the cost of medical insurance.

Smoking is one of the largest contributors to the rising cost of medical insurance, as a matter of fact. More than $75 billion in excess medical expenditures each year are related to smoking. In addition, there is the cost of lost productivity and the roughly 400,000 deaths from smoking-related illnesses.

While this phenomenon is a general one, creating more health needs and therefore more need for covered services, there are also specific instances in which smoking can directly increase the cost of medical insurance for an individual. Some companies, including both private and public companies, are making the decision to require tobacco users to pay higher premiums. Other companies are offering a no-smoking discount on medical insurance, although this still really just amounts to an increased fee for smokers.

The idea behind this raising of rates is, obviously, to get smokers to quit smoking, reduce the costs of medical insurance and keep employees healthy. There’s a cost benefit for employers, too. One study done in 1992 suggested that nonsmoking employees saved an average of $462 for the company on a yearly basis, in addition to less sick time. Another study demonstrated that smokers have, on average, about a third higher rate of absenteeism than nonsmokers.

Another trend, and one that may in the long run be more effective than raising medical insurance premiums for smokers, is smoking cessation programs. Work-based smoking cessation programs have shown a high rate of success. Some companies will subsidize smoking cessation medications, while others will offer other types of incentives for being in such a program.

Then are other ways to encourage someone to quit smoking, beyond just raising the cost of medical insurance or offering rewards at work. You can take the example of Speck, the son of John Mellencamp. Speck has started a campaign to convince the rocker to quit smoking. Mellencamp has agreed to quit smoking if one million people join the Facebook Group created by Speck. The Facebook group is called: “1,000,000 to join, my dad john mellencamp will quit smoking.”

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