Health and budgetary impact of extended duration anti-tobacco national media campaigns to reduce the harms of cigarette smoking
Discussant: Dr. Zhuo Chen
Author affiliations: 1HealthPartners Institute, Minneapolis, MN; 2Office of Smoking and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta GA; 3Office of the Associate Director for Policy, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta GA
Background: High-impact anti-tobacco media campaigns are a proven strategy to reduce the harms of cigarette smoking. Extended duration media campaigns have the potential to reduce smoking prevalence, but their health benefits and budgetary impact are unknown.
Methods: We employed a microsimulation model to estimate the 10- and 20-year health and budgetary impact of national anti-tobacco media campaigns with durations of 1, 5, and 10 years. We estimated the budgetary impact and time to the breakeven point from societal, all-payer, Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurer perspectives in the United States.
Results: The microsimulation predicts that a 10-year national smoking cessation campaign would reduce adult cigarette smoking prevalence by 1.3 percentage points, prevent 23,451 smoking-attributable deaths over the first 10 years, and produce net savings of $11.0, $5.0, $1.4, $3.6 and $0.3 billion from the societal, all-payer, Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurer perspectives, respectively. National anti-tobacco media campaigns of 1-, 5-, and 10-year durations would all produce net savings from each of these payer perspectives within 10 years.
Conclusions: One-, 5-, and 10-year anti-tobacco media campaigns all yield net savings within 10 years. Multi-year campaigns yield substantially higher cost savings than a one-year campaign.
