The cost of smoking for California's Hispanic community

The economic impact of smoking for California's Hispanic population for 2002 was estimated. The estimates include smoking-attributable health care expenditures and productivity losses from smoking-caused mortality.

Smoking-attributable health care expenditures for Hispanics were estimated using a series of econometric models for four types of expenditures: ambulatory care, drugs, inpatient care, and home health care. Models were estimated using national survey data. The estimated parameters were then applied to California-specific data. Smoking-attributable mortality was assessed using epidemiological models. Three measures of mortality were estimated: deaths, years of potential life lost, and the value of lost productivity.

Adult current smoking prevalence for Hispanics was 13.1% compared to 15.4% for all Californians in 2002. Male Hispanics smoke at much higher rates than females (18.7% vs. 7.2%), and one in four smokers in the state is Hispanic. The health care cost of smoking was $662 million for the Hispanic community. A total of 3,003 Hispanic Californians died of smoking-attributable illness in 2002, representing a loss of nearly 44,000 years of life and $711 million in productivity. The total cost of smoking for this community amounted to $1.4 billion (2002 dollars) or $1.9 billion expressed in 2010 dollars.

Smoking prevalence is relatively low among California Hispanics, but the economic impact is large because the population is large. Tobacco control programs should focus on helping Hispanic men who smoke to quit, maintaining low smoking prevalence among Hispanic women, and should be culturally tailored to specific Hispanic subpopulations with higher smoking rates.