When the state paid, people stopped smoking

From the December 7, 2010 Reuters health news item by Maggie Fox

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – When Massachusetts started paying for stop-smoking treatments, people not only kicked the habit but also had fewer heart attacks, researchers reported on Tuesday in the first study to show a clear payoff from investing in smoking prevention efforts.

Smoking dropped by 10 percent among clients of Medicaid, the state health insurance plan for the poor, and nearly 40 percent of Medicaid patients who smoked used benefits to get nicotine patches or drugs to help them quit, the researchers said….

…Thomas Land and colleagues at the Massachusetts Tobacco Cessation and Prevention Program, as well as the Harvard Medical School, looked at hospital records for the study, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine at http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000375.