Getting paid to quit may work for some smokers

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – During a single year when the Dutch government covered the costs of counseling and drugs to help smokers quit, calls to a national smoking-cessation hotline rose 10-fold, and the number of smokers in the country dropped significantly, according to a new study. The results, reported in the journal Addiction, suggest that more people may enroll in smoking cessation programs if their governments or insurance companies offer to pay for the therapies and medications, according to the study’s authors. “We can only speculate about what this means for individual smokers. …