Alzheimer’s, Dementia Triple Individual Health Care Costs
According to U.S. News & World Report, a recent Alzheimer’s Association report estimates that Alzheimer’s disease and dementia triple health care costs for afflicted seniors.
Photo by DerrickT via Flickr
In its report, the Alzheimer’s Association found that:
The average annual health-care cost for someone older than 65 with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia was $33,007 in 2004 — three times more than the $10,603 for people that age without the conditions.
Deaths from Alzheimer’s disease rose by 47 percent from 2000 to 2006 while the number of deaths from several other major diseases — including heart attack, stroke, breast cancer and prostate cancer — fell during that period.
States in the Rocky Mountains and Northwest will see the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease increase by at least 81 percent between 2000 and 2025.
By 2025, California and Florida will each be home to more than a half-million people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Experts agree that the U.S. needs to invest more into Alzheimer’s research to keep costs low in the future. Some even advocate that the U.S. Government double its annual budget for Alzheimer’s research to $1 billion.
The aging of the Baby Boom Generation is one of the major reasons for the growing concern over the costs of living with Alzheimer’s disease. Said Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, a psychiatry professor at Duke University Medical Center,
The bottom line is that we are an aging society, and if we don’t find a cure to delay or halt the disease, we are soon going to become an Alzheimer’s nation.
Posts from Health Reform Watch have been cited by media sources throughout the country, including The New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Kaiser Health News, The Health Care Blog, NPR's Planet Money Blog, Duke Univ. Med. Center News, American Health Line Alerts, BusinessWeek.com, Concurring Opinions, Balkinization, The New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, Las Vegas Sun, Maggie Mahar, Ezra Klein, Tom Geoghegan, and the official homepage of the Office of the Democratic Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, Steny Hoyer.
