After months of offset, Connecticut legislators adopted a state budget law. They decided to increase the tax on cigarettes. The proposal they established will increase the tax from $2 to $3 per pack, one of the highest in the nation.
Gov. M. Jodi Rell said that this new legislation is admissible only because “people don’t have to smoke”, but unfortunately there has been no discussion about how to help people cut their bad addiction.
Statistics show that Connecticut has one of the worst move documents when it comes to helping people quit smoking. In recent years, the state was ranked dead last in smoking cessation program coverage. This is despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from the Master Settlement Agreement and tobacco taxes each year.
Connecticut is one of a handful of states where smoking cessation coverage is supplied to state employees, (including lawmakers) but not residents on Medicaid. Medicaid participants represent the whole smoke at a higher rate than the general population.
The new smoking cessation programs save lives and save taxpayer money, said state legislators. This is extremely important to know especially when people consider that tobacco use claims the lives of almost 5,000 Connecticut residents and costs the state over $1 billion in health care bills each year.
States like Oklahoma and Massachusetts have seen colossal results with the supplement of cessation programs. Oklahoma has documented an increase in productivity and a decrease in costs for smoking-related diseases. And Massachusetts, whose Medicaid program has proposed cessation services to all Medicaid recipients since 2006, has seen 33,000 Medicaid recipients quitted smoking in just two years.
Connecticut’s lawmakers should look to neighboring state Rhode Island, which coupled its recent increase in tobacco taxes with insurance orders that require all smoking cessation programs to be covered. Coinciding legislation is pending to turn those regulations into law.
However raising taxes on cigarettes is a positive step towards reducing needless deaths due to smoking, concluded researchers.
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