500
New Zealand scraps world-first smoking ‘generation ban’ to fund tax cuts
(www.theguardian.com)
News from around the world!
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
Using the UK numbers, around 80k people die of smoking per year, costing the NHS alone £2.6bn, their full state pension cost is around £900m, so there is a sizeable gap between just the NHS cost and the amount on their pension as the pension saving has to be significantly more than the remaining years on their state pension as there is another set of costs next year, and the year after and so on.. Total cost per year is estimates at about £12bn, but direct government cost is a bit over £4bn. This doesn't include the fact that it ties up beds for other people who do not smoke, which means worse outcomes fro them, and this has knock on costs.
They just aren't killing them fast enough.