(Bloomberg View) — The income gap between smokers and nonsmokers has grown. And it's something companies may need to address directly in their efforts to help employees kick the habit.

Over the past several decades, smoking rates have fallen sharply among high-income, highly educated Americans and not as much for less educated, low-income people. The result is that, in 2013, the smoking rate exceeded 20 percent for people with a high school degree or less while among those with a graduate degree it was just 5.6 percent.

Among people living in poverty, smoking was almost twice as common (29 percent) as among those at or above the poverty line (16 percent).

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