Item — HN Reader

It's not just the universal healthcare enables access to healthcare to more people. When healthcare is something being paid for by everyone, the state of other people's health matters to you too (not just your own).

Therefore, things like public smoking bans (as we have in the UK) as well as public health campaigns around alcohol consumption and healthy eating become palatable. Regulating harmful foodstuffs becomes more important. The cost of smokers' adverse health was (and still is) enormous, and reducing that burden benefits everyone.

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Smokers actually cost less than non-smokers because they die a decade and a half sooner, and old age is where most expense happens.

The true issue is secondhand smoke. That for me is what it all is about: preventing unwilling people from being exposed to smoke, full stop.

About as many people die from smoking than from secondhand smoke. Think for a minute how horrifying that is.

> Smokers actually cost less than non-smokers because they die a decade and a half sooner, and old age is where most expense happens.

This is often mentioned, but it's simply not true. It's not old age itself that costs money, it's the part of your life where you need care and support. This is old age in otherwise healthy people, but smokers don't just drop dead one day, they go through as many if not more years of care and support as everyone else, they just do it younger (which costs in lost productive years too).

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cost-of-smoking-t...

I don’t think your link is showing what you want it to show - it’s showing costs, but not necessarily any sort of counterfactual delta AFAICT.

There’s been a number of studies on this, and they do seem to suggest that overall smoking saves society money. E.g. here’s one from Finland

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/6/e001678