Smokers' medical insurance bills may rise

Gannett News Service

Smokers be warned: Your habit might soon cost you a lot more.

Companies are increasingly tacking surcharges onto insurance premiums in an attempt to manage rising health-care costs, and some refuse to employ smokers.

Smoking-related health-care costs nationwide run $75.5 billion every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The price tag for lost productivity is an additional $92 billion a year, for a total of more than $167 billion.

Increasingly, smokers are being asked to pay a greater share of the bill. Spokeswoman Mary Thompson of BlueCross BlueShield, Tennessee's largest health insurer, says her company doesn't keep statistics on plans with employee surcharges, but their popularity appears to be on the rise.

"I see employers trying to take advantage of every opportunity that they can to help improve the health status of their employees," she says.

BlueCross BlueShield employees who smoke pay an additional $7 per pay period, but that figure is relatively modest compared with the $40-a-month surcharge Georgia state employees pay. The surcharge is $15 for state employees in West Virginia, $20 in Alabama and $15 to $30 a month in Kentucky, depending on the policy.

Though the practice has yet to be part of the business plans of Guam employers and health insurance companies, smokers already have boosted health insurance costs on Guam.

Although nothing is inherently wrong with making people accept financial responsibility for their choices, surcharges raise troubling issues, says Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group in Princeton, N.J.

"Surcharges are the first step down a road that America may not want to travel," Maltby says. "Surcharges sound nice when you talk about smokers because everyone hates smokers. But what about all the other bad habits that people have?"

Treatments for obesity-related and sexually transmitted diseases are costly. Too many beers after work? Not enough time at the gym? Surcharges conceivably could be levied for those behaviors, too.

Many smokers say they understand why they may have to pay more for health insurance. William Tatum, 54, of Huntington, W.Va., works in construction and smokes two packs of cigarettes a day.

"If I was an insurance company and was underwriting a policy, I would want my people clean," Tatum says. "It is just the risk involved."

A handful of companies are putting a more restrictive twist on smoke-free workplaces. This year Weyco, a Michigan health benefits management company, began testing employees for smoking and will fire those who fail a random test. Four of the company's 200 employees quit rather than submit to the policy.

The workers had a year's notice on the policy and could enroll in a company-sponsored smoking cessation class.

The policy is legal in Michigan, which doesn't have a law barring employers from firing employees for legal activities they engage in outside of work hours. Maltby says while surcharges are problematic but not inherently wrong, firing someone for smoking is clearly wrong.

"The only legitimate objection to an employee smoking is that it increases the company's medical costs," he says. "So the most that an employer is ethically entitled to do is have a surcharge."

 

 

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