HJBR Nov/Dec 2019

Healthcare Journal of BATON ROUGE I  NOV / DEC 2019 29 We love to live large in Louisiana, but there is a price to be paid for some of our overall health behaviors. Let’s try to wrap our collective minds around just one sta- tistic; through state taxes, we pay nearly $4 billion per year in costs associated with just smoking. If we get serious about help- ing our fellow citizens who smoke obtain cessation/nicotine addiction help to quit, we could avoid both the measurable costs ($4 billion) that add to our tax burden, and the unmeasurable costs of life-long health issues that inevitably impact the lives of smokers. To accomplish this will require a few changes: • Health plans who cover the people of Louisiana need to cover cessation treat- ment and medications, as reflected in the U.S. Public Health Service’s “Treat- ing Tobacco Use and Dependence: 2008 Update.” • Government-sponsored health benefits need to cover cessation treatment and medications, as reflected in the U.S. Pub- lic Health Service’s “Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence: 2008 Update”. • Physicians need to be provided training in evidence-based treatments for nicotine addiction. • Our cigarette tax needs to increase to limit access to tobacco products for those under 21 years of age. • Tobacco should not be a legal product for those under 21 year of age, to deny the tobacco industry access to another gen- eration of consumers. • The Louisiana legislature needs to redi- rect tobacco settlement funds from the general fund (or use new tobacco taxes) to fund a CDC recommended, state-wide cessation program until either the settle- ment funds are no longer received from the tobacco industry, or until no Louisi- ana resident smokes tobacco products. What is the biggest challenge the Trust faces? The Smoking Cessation Trust’s court order does not allow us to advertise. Due to this restriction, the number of Louisi- ana residents we have been able to reach with information about the Trust program has been reduced. We know from the work we do with the CDC that when they spend advertising funds for the Tips from Former Smokers campaign each year in Louisiana, the calls to the state Quitline increase by three to five times over the period when they are not advertising. It seems logical that if the Trust could advertise, we could help the entire potential Trust member- ship of more than 400,000 people more efficiently. Therefore, we rely heavily on physicians and hospitals across the state to identify and refer patients who started smoking before 9/1/1988 to the Trust for assistance in order to get them qualified and approved to receive free care and stop smoking cigarettes. While we hope the court that oversees the Trust will see fit to extend the 10 years codi- fied in the trial court orders pertaining to the Trust, those eligible in Louisiana can only count on the Trust’s benefits being available till July 2022. If doctors and hospitals truly care about their patients who smoke, now would be the ideal time to refer them to us. How can eligible people who want to quit contact the Smoking Cessation Trust? Louisiana citizens who started smoking before 9/1/1988 can contact the Smoking Cessation Trust at www.smokefreela.org ; locally at 504-529-5665 or toll-free at 855- 259-6346. n “If we get serious about helping our fellow citi- zens who smoke obtain cessation/nicotine ad- diction help to quit, we could avoid both the measurable costs ($4 billion) that add to our tax burden, and the unmeasurable costs of life-long health issues that inevitably impact the lives of smokers.”