That Employee Who Smokes Costs The Boss $5,800 A Year
by Nancy Shute
June 04, 2013, 12:23 PM - NPR
Smoking is expensive, and not just for the person buying the cigs. Employers
are taking hard looks at the cost of employing smokers as they try to cut health
insurance costs, with some refusing to hire people who say they smoke.
But figures on the cost of smoking have been rough estimates at best, with a
very general
estimate of $193 billion a year nationwide.
Researchers now say they're got much tighter focus on the number: $5,800 per
smoker per year.
And the biggest chunk of that comes not in health care costs, but in work
lost during all those smoke breaks. That came in at $3,077, based on an estimate
of five smoke breaks during the work day.
"The smoking breaks added up to a lot more than we expected," says Micah
Berman, an incoming assistant professor of law and public policy at Ohio State
University, who led the study,
which was published in Tobacco Control.
The researchers tried to be conservative in estimating the number of smoke
breaks, figuring on five 15-minute breaks in an eight-hour workday, three of
which took place during sanctioned break times. So the cost could well be
higher.
Other costs include more sick days due to health problems, at $517 per
smoker, and $462 a year for lower productivity while working because of
withdrawal symptoms, which kick in within 30 minutes of that last drag.
In recent years, some hospitals, including the Cleveland Clinic, have decided
to no longer hire
smokers. But more than half of states make it illegal
to discriminate against smokers in the hiring process.
Some employers charge higher health insurance premiums to employees who
smoke. But that could keep smokers from getting much needed medical care and
smoking cessation programs, critics argue. A small number of states have passed
laws protecting smokers against a provision in the Federal Affordable Care
Act that lets smokers be charged more.
"I'm not sure what impact that is going to have on people making decisions
starting to smoke or quitting," Berman says of efforts to put the financial hurt
on smokers. "Most people start to smoke when they're minors" — not a time when
they're thinking about future health insurance premiums. Quitting, he tells
Shots, "is extremely difficult and usually takes a lot of attempts to be
successful."
But could smokers turn out to be cheaper hires because they don't
live as long, avoiding the need for years of health care and retirement
benefits? Not so, Berman says. There's a potential cost savings only if the
employer has a defined benefit plan that gives retirees a guaranteed pension,
Berman and his colleagues say. Those kinds of retirement plans are increasingly
rare.
But if a company has one, they can save $296 a year in pension costs by
hiring a smoker, the researchers say. Still, that's far outweighed by the cost
of all those smoke breaks.
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