One of the newest aids to help
people quit smoking does not involve pills, nicotine patches or classes, but
good old-fashioned money.
A study published Thursday in The
New England Journal of Medicine found monetary incentive programs to be
five times more effective than free smoking cessation aids.
The most effective of these programs
plays on the human tendency toward risk aversion. According to lead author
Scott Halpern, having people put their own money at risk if they don’t stop
smoking is even more effective than simply giving people a cash award if they
do quit.
In a study of monetary incentive
programs involving smokers at a large U.S. drug sales company, employees who
deposited $150, and received it back with an additional $650 when they stopped
smoking, were twice as successful at quitting as those who were simply given
$800 after they kicked the habit.
“We simply don’t wish to part with our
own money," Halpern said. "And that explains why both relatively few
people were willing to make that $150 deposit in the first place but also,
among those who do, the skin-in-the-game approach is so overwhelmingly
effective and far more effective and any smoking cessation strategy that has
ever been tried.”
Halpern, a health policy analyst at
the University of Pennsylvania, said the hundreds of dollars spent on monetary
incentive smoking cessation programs are a bargain.
“Employers are spending somewhere
between $3,000 and $6,000 per year to employ a smoker, above and beyond the
costs to employ a nonsmoker," he said. "And that’s attributable to
increased health care costs, reduced worker productivity, absenteeism and the
like.”
Halpern said the same benefit in
cost savings could apply to governments that also spend a lot of money on
smokers.
Cigarette smoking is truly a global
health problem. It's the No. 1 cause of preventable death, according to the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The WHO says that tobacco
kills 6 million people yearly — a figure that is expected to rise to 8 million
by 2030 unless urgent action is taken — and that an estimated 80 percent of the
world's 1 billion smokers light up in developing countries.
