Environmentally friendly asthma inhalers may be good for the atmosphere, but they have nearly doubled what people with asthma pay out of pocket for inhalers. That’s the take-home message from a study led by Dr. Anupam Jena, an assistant professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital. The findings were published online today in JAMA Internal Medicine. In 2008, the FDA banned a class of asthma inhalers that contained ozone-depleting propellants called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Depletion of the earth’s ozone layer causes serious risks for humans, including an increased danger of skin cancer. The replacement propellants are more expensive than CFCs. Because more than 25 million people in the U.S. rely on inhalers for quick