Alex Silva remembers the day well. He was a pack-a-day smoker in the fall of 2002 when his boss told him the news: One year hence, Silva and every other CFI Westgate Resort employee in Florida would be prohibited from smoking — not just on the job or on Westgate property, but anywhere, any time.

Silva, a manager in the time-share company's marketing department, started working out more and smoking less. Shortly before the Westgate smoking ban took effect on Sept. 1, 2003, Silva smoked his last cigarette.

Westgate's hard-line policy on smoking is unusual only in its reach. While the Florida Clean Indoor Act already has all but banished smoking from the immediate workplace, more employers are extending the ban to anywhere on their property while also aggressively promoting smoking-cessation programs.

Bans aren't the only anti-smoking weapons available to employers. With irrefutable evidence that smokers as a group have higher health care costs, more employers are considering charging higher health insurance premiums to workers who smoke.

Penalizing smokers with higher insurance premiums is still viewed by most employers as too much of a morale-buster, but that's going to change, predicted Becky Cherney, president of the Florida Health Care Coalition.

"Employers are saying they can no longer afford to subsidize bad behavior," Cherney said. "You have to make the individual pay for the bad habit."

Even a leading critic of hard-line employer smoking policies accepts that logic. Smokers do have higher health care costs, and "it's not unfair to make you pay for the extra costs you've created," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J.

But it's still a dangerous road, Maltby said, noting that obesity rapidly is overtaking smoking as America's most costly health care problem.

"Are you going to make fat people pay more, or those of us who have dangerous hobbies like skiing or hang gliding?" he said. "It goes on and on. Pretty soon, your employer knows everything about your private life in order to save on health care costs."