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0 pointssjwright8y ago0 comments

> I believe this has been debunked.

It might be true that it tobacco reduces the overall health care burden because it causes people to die earlier, but it's not relevant. Setting your car on fire might also have the side-effect of lowering the operating cost of that car.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

icebraining8y ago· 2 in thread

Of course it's relevant to how much governments spend. You can't simply ignore the consequences you dislike.

That doesn't mean it's a good reason not to discourage smoking, but that's because we shouldn't hinge that decision on the financial considerations in the first place.

throwawayjava8y ago

I think there are a lot of reasons to scoff at the "but death saves money" argument. Most of those reasons have to do with the difficulty of accounting for the value of a life fully lived.

E.g., if a highly educated worker dies ten years before retirement, how much productive labor did the society that educated that person lose out on?

What about the non-paid labor that the elderly/retired often take on? "Free" child care for the grand kids, much higher rates of volunteering in churches/schools/etc., and so on.

Suffice it to say that this is not exactly a trivial computation...

icebraining8y ago

I wouldn't say it's trivial, but it does probably save money overall. Highly educated workers are rare overall, and they smoke at much lower rates, so they barely count to the average. The elderly get an income enough to live off plus usually quite a lot of expensive healthcare for many other conditions - and I'm glad they do! But not for financial reasons.

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