Massachusetts does it again! By thinking outside the box, the state has provided accessible tools for MassHealth adults to quit smoking, and the program has seen unprecedented success.
Today, on the eve of the Great American Smokeout, the Massachusetts Tobacco Cessation and Prevention Program held and event at the State House to release data showing the significant health impact of the MassHealth cessation benefit.
Nurses’ Hall was packed with legislators, advocates, consumers, and press who listened as Department of Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach shared the highlights of the research. The results are impressive, and demonstrate that investing in good health policy reduces health care costs quickly. The research shows that 77% of adult smokers in Massachusetts want to quit. Over the course of only two months, nearly 10,000 Massachusetts residents requested the free nicotine patches offered by MTCP in 2008 after the cigarette tax increase.
Research shows that with the appropriate support and medication, smokers are more than twice as likely to successfully quit. As the Globe reported on the front page today, about 75,000 people on MassHealth have used smoking cessation treatment and 33,000 have been able to successfully quit. MTPC highlights further ways the state has saved money among MassHealth adults by providing a cessation benefit:
- 38% decrease in hospitalizations for heart attacks;
- 17% drop in emergency room and clinic visits due to asthma; and there were
- 17% fewer claims for adverse maternal birth complications since implementation.
This relieves a heavy burden on the state – in Massachusetts alone, tobacco use costs $4.3 billion in health care costs every year. MassHealth cessation benefits have made history by sharply reducing smoking rates, costs, and health outcomes in the course of a year.
-Courtney Chelo
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Smolers will continue to pay the same as non-smokeers, MCC. Instead, the uninsured, healthy, non-smokers are labeled as the “bad guys”, and forced to purchase insurance so that the insurance companies recoup losses spent on the sick smokers.
It’s interesting how Mr. Hussein Obama just recently admitted that the mandate is to make up for the insurance companies having to underwrite everyone. It used to be that those advocating the mandate portrayed every uninsured paerson as visiting the ER on a daily basis and in poor health.
One thing that Mr. Hussein Obama hasn’t factored in: Those of us who are healthy and will be forced to buy insurance will now seek medical care that we don’t really need. For example, I have two bunions on my feet. I have been advised that I will never need surgery. But, as soon as I am forced to pay $4000 per year on surgery, you can bet that I’ll have the $12,000 surgery anyhow, just to stick it to the system!
There. Feel better, mandate advocates?
Tobacco uses costs 4.3 Billion in health care costs every year but Massachusetts won’t charge a smoker more for their coverage. We all pay for their poor decisions because Mass. won’t allow the insurance companies to charge more for smokers.
This has nothing to do with medical underwriting. This is simple way to add revenue into the system without penalizing anyone for pre-existing conditions.