Smokers Cost Employers Thousands More Than Nonsmokers

About $6000 in extra annual costs stem from more time off, smoking breaks, health care, study shows

By Mary Elizabeth Dallas

HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, June 4 (HealthDay News) -- Compared to nonsmoking employees, every staff member who lights up costs their employer nearly $6,000 more each year, according to a new report.

The researchers found that more time off, smoking breaks and added health care costs were to blame for this discrepancy. The findings could have implications for smoking policies in the workplace, they suggested.

"Employees who smoke impose significant excess costs on private employers," Micah Berman, of the College of Public Health & Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, and colleagues wrote. "The results of this study may help inform employer decisions about tobacco-related policies."

For the study, the investigators analyzed previous studies in order to estimate the costs associated with employing a smoker. In making their calculation, they also analyzed absenteeism, presenteeism (lower productivity while working due to smoking-related health problems), smoking breaks, health care costs and pension benefits for smokers.

The study, published in the June 3 online edition of Tobacco Control, revealed that low productivity due to more missed days at work costs employers, on average, $517 annually for each employee that smokes. Meanwhile, presenteeism costs $462 annually for each smoker, smoking breaks cost $3,077 a year per smoker and excess health care expenses cost $2,056 annually for every employee that smokes.

Because smokers are more likely to die at a younger age than nonsmokers, annual pension costs were an average of $296 less for each employee who smoked, the researchers noted. Overall, the total estimated cost to employers was $5,816 per year.

In the United States alone, 19 percent of adults smoke, putting themselves at greater risk for cancer, heart and lung disease. Some U.S. companies avoid hiring smokers or have started charging employees who smoke higher premiums for health insurance, the researchers pointed out in a journal news release.

"It is important to remember that the costs imposed by tobacco use are not simply financial costs. It is not possible to put a price on the lost lives and the human suffering caused by smoking," Berman's team wrote. "The desire to help one's employees lead healthier and longer lives should provide an additional impetus for employers to work towards eliminating tobacco from the workplace."

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Thousands of Mistakes Made in Surgery Every Year

Dec. 26, 2012 -- More than 4,000 preventable mistakes occur in surgery every year at a cost of more than $1.3 billion in medical malpractice payouts, according a new study.

How preventable? Well, researchers call them "never events" because they are the kind of surgical mistakes that should never happen, like performing the wrong procedure or leaving a sponge inside a patient's body after surgery.

But researchers found that paid malpractice settlements and judgments for these types of never events occurred about 10,000 times in the U.S. between 1990 and 2010. Their analysis estimates that each week surgeons:

Leave a foreign object like a sponge or towel inside a patient's body after an operation 39 timesPerform the wrong procedure on a patient 20 timesOperate on the wrong body site 20 times

"I continue to find the frequency of these events alarming and disturbing," says Donald Fry, MD, executive vice president at Michael Pine and Associates, a health care think tank in Chicago. "I think it's a difficult thing for clinicians to talk about, but it is something that must be improved."

In the study, researchers looked at malpractice claim information for surgical never events from the National Practitioner Data Bank from 1990 to 2010. The results are published in Surgery.

Malpractice settlements and judgments relating to leaving a sponge or other object inside a patient, performing the wrong operation, operating on the wrong site or on the wrong person were included in their analysis.

The results showed a total of 9,744 paid malpractice judgments and claims for these types of never events were reported over the 20-year period, totaling $1.3 billion.

Based on these results, researchers estimate that 4,044 surgical never events occur each year in the U.S.

Researchers say the actual number of these surgical mistakes is likely even higher.

"What we report is the low end of the range because many never events go unreported," says researcher Marty Makary, MD, MPH, associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Makary says by law, hospitals are required to report never events that result in a settlement or judgment.

But not all items left behind after surgery are discovered. They are typically only reported when a patient experiences a complication after surgery, and doctors try to find out why.

"We believe the events we describe are real," says Makary. "I cannot imagine a hospital paying out a settlement for a false claim of a retained sponge."

The consequences of surgical mistakes ranged from temporary injury in 59% of the cases to death in 6.6% of the cases and permanent injury in 33% of people affected.

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