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According to a chief medical officer of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan in Detroit, implementing smoking ban on Michigan’s workplace will help save hundreds of lives from avertable heart attacks, strokes and upper respiratory diseases and even save taxpayers and insured individuals millions of dollars.
After several years of debate, Gov. Jennifer Granholm finally signed the law Friday at the Michigan Brewing Co. in Webberville. The ban, which will go into effect on May, will be applied over bars, restaurants and work places, not including the Detroit casinos, cigar bars and tobacco specialty stores.
“Nearly 15,000 die each year from their own smoking,” said Simmer. “Another 1,300 to 2,400 die each year from second-hand smoke in Michigan,” he said.
In a study made by the state Department of Community Health, it shows that smoking increases annual health care costs in Michigan by $3.4 billion, including $1.1 billion in additional Medicaid costs.
To participate in this recent campaign, numerous Blue Cross products, including Healthy Blue Living, offer premium discounts for people who quit smoking. Simmer said Blue Cross is currently studying the health care cost impact of people who have quit smoking in its Healthy Blue product line.
“I believe this (smoking ban) will help us continue to experience a lower health care cost trend than other Great Lake states,” Simmer said.
(4.5 out of 5)
1,300 to 2,400 die each year from second-hand smoke??
The anti-smoking cartel gets these numbers from a risk commputor called SAMMEC (google SAMMEC)
No one on this planet ever died solely from second-hand smoke.
Having said that who in the right mind would believe anything the Blue Cross Blue Shield would say.
The Dept. of Community Health might want to do a bit more research before making up its figures. I would suggest starting with a reading of “Taxes, Costs, and the MSA”
where the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that if everyone stopped smoking health care costs would INCREASE by 15%. More recent research supports such a claim. When taxes (both the regular ones and the rather illegal MSA “tax”) are brought into the picture smokers end up subsidizing the health care costs of nonsmokers rather than the other way around.
Michael J. McFadden
Author of “Dissecting Antismokers’ Brains”
My apologies. I did not realize that a web link would not reproduce here. My reference above, to “Taxes, Social Cost, and the MSA” can be found by Googling the following three words:
Viscusi Nusselder Irish
No quotes or anything, just those three words in the Google search window. Read it and you’ll see there’s a sound counterargument to be made to the main article on this page. Please overlook the formatting errors where quotation marks are replaced by question marks however. At some point I need to go back and fix that… :>
- MJM