I believe this has been debunked.
See https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/22/alcohol-...
Admission: I never got the chance to look at the research so I don’t know how reliable it is.
See https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/22/alcohol-...
Admission: I never got the chance to look at the research so I don’t know how reliable it is.
It seems to be that the obese and smokers do cost a lot more on the healthcare system - however they also die earlier, and so the net cost ends up being less.
> Nevertheless, these findings suggest that although effective obesity prevention reduces the costs of obesity-related diseases, this reduction is offset by the increased costs of diseases unrelated to obesity that occur during the extra years of life gained by slimming down.
However, it doesn't seem like government funding into prevention or research were also tallied into the costs of the illnesses, which are not inconsiderable.
[0] http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...
Yes... if everyone died, including the smokers, governments would effectively cut healthcare costs to 0. Thats not how public health systems work though.
I would not say debunked
It might be true that it tobacco reduces the overall health care burden because it causes people to die earlier, but it's not relevant. Setting your car on fire might also have the side-effect of lowering the operating cost of that car.
That doesn't mean it's a good reason not to discourage smoking, but that's because we shouldn't hinge that decision on the financial considerations in the first place.
E.g., if a highly educated worker dies ten years before retirement, how much productive labor did the society that educated that person lose out on?
What about the non-paid labor that the elderly/retired often take on? "Free" child care for the grand kids, much higher rates of volunteering in churches/schools/etc., and so on.
Suffice it to say that this is not exactly a trivial computation...