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Article published Aug 12, 2005
COLUMBIA -- State employee Phil Ricard sat outside Thursday taking a cigarette break. He's been smoking for 30 years and smokes a pack a day.
"My wife wants me to quit," he says. "And I know I need to."
The state also wants him to quit and is willing to pay for the nicotine patch, nicotine gum or whatever method he needs to be successful.
The state Budget and Control Board voted this week for the state health plan to pay for smoking cessation programs for the 60,000 employees it covers who smoke. Taxpayers will pay for it, though, instead of tobacco settlement funds.
The state attorney general's office got the state involved in the settlement, which brought in $910 million for South Carolina. State lawmakers passed a law dictating how the money would be spent, with 73 percent going to health care costs.
Attorney General Henry McMaster, who was not in office during the settlement, said, "I think what has happened, in the last few years the Medicaid costs, the medical costs for a variety of things, have just skyrocketed. And the Legislature, apparently, in its wisdom, has determined that they have to put all the money they can into other programs and they had to eliminate some. And one of them was smoking cessation."
McMaster said about $450 million of the $910 million remains to be used for health care.
But Mike Sponhour, spokesman for the Budget and Control Board, said that money is already obligated and couldn't be used to pay for state employees to stop smoking.
Even though taxpayers will pick up the tab, it should save them money in the long run, Sponhour said. "We estimate it'll cost about a million dollars a year, but save us five times that amount in the next several years because the cost of smoking is so high when you look at the health care costs and the other things associated with people missing work because they're not as healthy," Sponhour said.
Interested state employees can call a toll-free hotline starting in January and will be assigned a counselor, who will work through each case and decide which stop-smoking approach is most likely to be successful.
Sponhour said even if a lot of the smokers are not successful, those who are will save enough money that the state will come out ahead.
Ricard didn't know about the new benefit until a reporter told him.
"It's definitely not healthy, so it'd be a good thing to stop," he said.
"So, yeah, I'd probably be interested."