Employer sponsored insurance, together with accompanying regulations about individual costs, is tuned to make sure the smoker and the healthy person pay the same price.
That is kind of what insurance is for though - to level out the cost for everyone.
It's a common misconception that smokers cost society.
The truth is, smokers die earlier and cost tax payers less in insurance benefits and health care than non-smokers. [1] We should be encouraging people to smoke if we want to save money. (I'm joking!)
That is kind of what insurance is for though - to level out the cost for everyone.
No, the point of insurance is to reduce the variance of an individual's future cost. Due to the law of large numbers, averaging across independent identically distributed people is equivalent to averaging over the future, but that's a side effect.
Averaging over independent non-identically distributed people is NOT part of insurance at all - that's what I'm describing as "the socialist part".
An example illustrating the difference - say you have 10 dice, and if a die rolls a 6 it costs $1,000. You also have 10 coins, and if the coin comes up heads, it costs $1,000. Insurance is when you charge the dice $166 and the coins $500. Socialism is when you charge everyone $333 - that's redistribution from the dice to the coins.
The link about smoking costs is interesting, however that applies at the level of government paying for lifetime costs. Annual costs are higher. So insurance for this year should cost the smoker more than the healthy person.
That is kind of what insurance is for though - to level out the cost for everyone.
It's a common misconception that smokers cost society. The truth is, smokers die earlier and cost tax payers less in insurance benefits and health care than non-smokers. [1] We should be encouraging people to smoke if we want to save money. (I'm joking!)
[1] http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...