Some employers reward employees who quit smoking; others fire them if they can’t. Some are choosing not to hire smokers at all.

Punishing smokers is not enough to reduce the impact of smoking on health care costs. Employers should provide programs helping promote healthy living, says Michele Dodds, vice president of health and wellness at Chicago-based ComPsych.

“You have to make wellness part of the culture, and that means more than just not hiring smokers,” she says. “Wellness is about improving health, [and] smoking is not the only risk factor.”

While a major contributor to chronic illness, smoking is less prevalent among the adult population than obesity. Twenty-three percent of the adult population in America smokes, while 65 percent is obese or overweight. By 2012, three of four adults are expected to be overweight or obese. It’s unlikely that companies would extend their ban on not hiring smokers to those who are overweight. “You’d have a difficult time staffing,” Dodds says, “if you said, ‘We’re not going to hire someone who is overweight or obese.’”