CDC spent only $480 per smoker with 2012 anti-smoking campaign
ATLANTA — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent only $480 per smoker who quit on account of its 2012 Tips From Former Smokers campaign, according to an agency study released Wednesday.
All told, the CDC spent $48 million on the initiative, which resulted in approximately 100,000 smokers quitting permanently. This compares to an annual health care spend in the United States attributable to cigarette smoking that is as much as $170 billion a year. Sixty percent of that cost is paid for by Americans through public programs such as Medicare or Medicaid.
“There is no question the Tips campaign is a ‘best buy’ for public health – it saves lives and saves money,” said CDC director Tom Frieden. “Smoking-related disease costs this nation more than $289 billion a year. The Tips campaign is one of the most cost-effective of all health interventions. This study shows how much the Tips campaign accomplished by being on the air for just 12 weeks. We would expect the benefits to be even greater if Tips was on the air all year.”
A commonly accepted threshold for cost-effectiveness of a public health intervention is $50,000 per year of life saved. When related to smoking, that cost-effectiveness figure may also include costs of counseling, medications and other expenses contributing to successful cessation. Even when those costs are added to the cost of the Tips campaign, the total is still 15 times less than the $50,000 benchmark for cost-effectiveness, the CDC noted.
The study also calculated the 2012 campaign will save about 179,000 healthy life-years at a cost of $268 per year of healthy life gained, and contributed to averting about 17,000 premature deaths at a cost of about $2,200 per premature death averted.
Tips From Former Smokers is the first federally funded national mass media anti-smoking campaign. Hard-hitting mass media campaigns can effectively reduce cigarette use, the CDC concluded. The 2014 Surgeon General’s Report called for high-impact national media campaigns to air at high frequency and exposure levels year round for a decade or more, as part of a comprehensive strategy to bring down smoking rates to under 10%.
“This is further proof the Tips campaign is a smart, effective and efficient use of taxpayer dollars,” said Tim McAfee, director of CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health, and one of the authors of the study. “Our mission is to protect the public health, and the 2012 Tips ads did this by motivating 1.6 million smokers to make a quit attempt. In addition, our responsibility is to spend public dollars as wisely and efficiently as possible. This study shows Tips cleared this bar with ample room to spare.”
The results of the study were published Dec. 10 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.