Would You Like to Get Paid to Quit Smoking?
February 12, 2009
From the New England Journal of Medicine there was an interesting article about paying people to quit smoking actually worked. All quotes are from the article.
Methods We randomly assigned 878 employees of a multinational company based in the United States to receive information about smoking-cessation programs (442 employees) or to receive information about programs plus financial incentives (436 employees). The financial incentives were $100 for completion of a smoking-cessation program, $250 for cessation of smoking within 6 months after study enrollment, as confirmed by a biochemical test, and $400 for abstinence for an additional 6 months after the initial cessation, as confirmed by a biochemical test. Individual participants were stratified according to work site, heavy or nonheavy smoking, and income. The primary end point was smoking cessation 9 or 12 months after enrollment, depending on whether initial cessation was reported at 3 or 6 months. Secondary end points were smoking cessation within the first 6 months after enrollment and rates of participation in and completion of smoking-cessation programs.
Results The incentive group had significantly higher rates of smoking cessation than did the information-only group 9 or 12 months after enrollment (14.7% vs. 5.0%, P<0.001) and 15 or 18 months after enrollment (9.4% vs. 3.6%, P<0.001). Incentive-group participants also had significantly higher rates of enrollment in a smoking-cessation program (15.4% vs. 5.4%, P<0.001), completion of a smoking-cessation program (10.8% vs. 2.5%, P<0.001), and smoking cessation within the first 6 months after enrollment (20.9% vs. 11.8%, P<0.001).
What does this mean exactly? It means that this test company where they conducted this showed that more people actually quit smoking for good. The results shown that if they were able to quit for 6 months, then they are most likely able to continue to not smoke.
What does this mean for health insurance? If this were done in more large companies and it worked it would greatly reduce the cost of health insurance because most people realize the tremendous link between tabacco and cancer which costs an enormous amount of money.
Health insurance in a group setting usually rate up depending on how many unhealthy s there are in the group and I know of some companies that specifically give you a higher premium for being a tobacco user! So again enormous amounts of money could then be saved by companies and maybe even could convince the insurance company based on statistics to lower the premiums if all companies got on board, but it’s not a convincing enough study to know if it would really work long term or not. People are people of getting back into old ways and old habits so probably can’t count on it.
Maybe they can still use some of the economic bill to help get this going;) Ha Ha
Comments
Got something to say?