Preventing Premature Death

The Problem

Employers spend $300 billion each year on health insurance for employees, dependents, and retirees, and over $75 billion is spent on health costs related to beneficiaries' tobacco use. Telephonic tobacco dependence treatments like Free & Clear's cessation program can improve worker health and productivity while saving money for the employer.

Cost to Employers of Having Employees Who Smoke

• Excess medical costs + productivity losses + absenteeism + work breaks = more than $3,000 per year per smoker.
• Smoking-related productivity losses of $81 billion per year, or an average of $1,760 per year per smoker.
• Lost work days = lost productivity. a smoker has 34% more sick days each year than a nonsmoker.

By providing a benefit plan with a tobacco cessation treatment option, an employer can avoid future tobacco-related costs and see a return on their investment as medical cost savings start to accrue to the employer after the second year of providing the treatment option.

Solution - A Tobacco Dependence Treatment Benefit

Based on the U.S. Public Health Service's 2000 guideline on tobacco cessation, an effective tobacco cessation program should include the following three elements: physician advice to quit, counseling by qualified cessation specialists (can be face-to-face, over the telephone, in groups), and pharmacotherapy (can be nicotine gum, patch, inhaler, nasal spray, or buproprion).

Providing a tobacco cessation benefit has advantages for both the employer and employee. The keys to providing a successful program are:

• Obtain leadership agreement that helping employees quit smoking is good for the company and set a goal to encourage significant fraction of employees who smoke to enroll in the benefit
• Eliminate financial barriers to participation by requiring no co-pay or only a pharmacy-standard co-pay for the use of the benefit.
• Provide easy access to the program by making it a workplace benefit to encourage employees to enroll and use the program through work.
• Provide a telephonic treatment program because telephone delivery is convenient and does not detract from work time.
• Cover counseling and pharmacotherapy under the benefit and encourage employees to use both.
• Market and promote the cessation benefit internally to show employees that the company is committed to helping people quit smoking and to ensure employees understand the benefit and its merits.
• Institute a smoke-free policy in the workplace which improves employee health and increases benefit utilization by employees.

Conclusion

Tobacco dependence treatment services can be made available to smokers through employee health plans as a specialized option and as a direct service sponsored by employers. Strong employer support for the benefit and encouragement for employees to utilize it is essential to achieving high utilization rates. Many studies show that high utilization rates of cessation programs by smokers results in the highest numbers of successful quitters. By assisting employees in their efforts to quit smoking, employers will see a return on investment in terms of savings from high tobacco-related medical costs and losses to tobacco-related productivity.

Examples of Tobacco Cessation Benefit Programs

• Carpenters Trust of Western Washington case study

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