Study: Paying smokers to quit helps

Dangling enough dollars in front of smokers who want to quit helps many more succeed, an experiment with hundreds of General Electric Co. workers indicates.

Among those paid up to $750 to quit and stay off cigarettes, 15 percent were still tobacco-free about a year later. That may not sound like much, but it's three times the success rate of a comparison group that got no such bonuses.

GE was so impressed it plans to offer an incentive program nationwide next year, aiming to save some of the company's estimated $50 million spent annually in extra health care and other costs for smoking employees.

"This kind of reward system provides them with direct, positive feedback in the present," not just delayed, intangible health benefits, said Dr. Kevin Volpp, the lead researcher of the study, which began in 2005.

The $750 was "a good incentive," said Dan Anzalone, a study participant who quit smoking cold turkey three years ago next month -- after a 35-year habit.

"I was getting rewarded for something that I should be doing anyway," said Anzalone, 54. "You'd be surprised at what that little incentive does."

A logistics specialist at a GE plant in Schenectady, N.Y., Anzalone tried quitting with antidepressants about seven years ago but couldn't. He tried quitting on New Year's Day most years but generally lasted only a couple of days.

So he signed up for Penn's federally funded study, unaware that he would be paid. Half of the 878 participants, at about 85 GE sites, were put in the financial rewards group; the other half were just encouraged to join quit-smoking programs and use the company's health coverage for doctor visits and anti-smoking drugs.

The incentive group got increasingly higher payments the longer they stayed off tobacco, up to $750 after 12 months.

The study showed that after nine to 12 months, about 15 percent of those being paid had stayed off cigarettes, compared with just 5 percent of the unpaid group. In addition, four times as many people getting cash completed a smoking-cessation program.

Volpp said similar numbers of people in the two groups used aids such as nicotine patches and the drug Zyban.