What we as a nation have done with $245 billion is spent it on diabetes related care. It's an astronomical amount, especially considering it increased 41 percent from $174 billion in 2007. And that was just five years ago.
A new study, called Economic Costs of Diabetes in the U.S. in 2012, commissioned by the American Diabetes Association, was published in the April issue of Diabetes Care. The study estimated the health care and work-related costs of diagnosed diabetes.
John Anderson, president of medicine and science for the ADA, says the cost has risen because of the increased number of patients with the disease. "When you look at the per-patient cost of diabetes, it has remained roughly flat," he said.
Matt Peterson, the ADA's managing director of medical information adds, "Overall, we're not seeing that each person with diabetes is costing us more." He also said that medication costs did not increase significantly and hospitalization costs decreased.
The study reported that roughly 22.3 million Americans were diagnosed with diabetes last year alone. The earlier study published in 2007 estimated that 17.5 million people were diagnosed with either Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes in that year.
Direct medical costs totaled $176 billion, which included hospital and emergency care, office visits, and medications. Indirect costs were $69 billion, and accounted for work absenteeism, reduced or lost productivity, and unemployment caused by the disease.
Government insurance, like Medicare, Medicaid, and the military, covered 62.4 percent of the costs of diabetes care, while private insurance covered 34.4 percent and 3.2 percent was self-pay. Yearly per person costs were broken down by gender. Women paid $8,331 in total per-capita health expenditures and men paid $7,458. California, the state with the largest percentage of diabetics, had the highest costs for diabetes, which totaled $27.55 billion.
Reference: USA Today
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