Soda & Diabetes, How Much Does That Can of Soda Really Cost? Part II
Filed under: Cost Control, Proposed Legislation, preventive care
Photo by Michael Reeve
Diabetes. In a brief but interesting interview on NPR’s Marketplace, Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson had this to say:
HALVORSEN: …. Right now, when you look at diabetes, 32 percent of the cost of Medicare is diabetes. It’s the number one cost of blindness, it’s the number one cause of amputations, it’s the number one cause of kidney failures. And when you look at the care delivery patterns in America, we only get care right for diabetics 8 percent of the time. If we got care right for diabetics 80 percent of the time, we’d cut the number of kidney failures in half.
A few days ago we began to ask, “How Much Does that Can of Soda Really Cost?” We considered cost in terms of external or social cost (not price for the actual can of soda, but that which results incidental to the primary transaction and may be borne by other than the buyer or seller), and noted that a recent study shows that obesity plays a prominent role in health care expenditures, and that many believe that soda and other sugary soft drinks play a prominent role in obesity. We noted that the Wall St. Journal reported that
Overall obesity-related health spending reaches $147 billion, double what it was nearly a decade ago, says the study published Monday by the journal Health Affairs.
Obesity-related conditions now account for 9.1% of all medical spending, up from 6.5% in 1998, the study concluded.
Obesity is a key factor in Type 2 diabetes. And 32% of Medicare costs are attributable to diabetes. It is no stretch to say that if we have a Medicare cost problem in this country (we do), what we really have is a diabetes problem (and, considering Halvorsen’s “we only get it right 8% of the time” figure, a diabetes treatment problem as well).
But first things first. 32% is a mere scooch (yes, that’s the technical term) away from ONE THIRD. That’s an enormous number. If one were to relate this portion of Medicare expense to houesehold expenditures, it occupies a place similar to a mortgage– but an expensive mortgage in a house that no one wants to live in.
In addition, according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA)
The total annual economic cost of diabetes in 2007 was estimated to be $174 billion. Medical expenditures totaled $116 billion and were comprised of $27 billion for diabetes care, $58 billion for chronic diabetes-related complications, and $31 billion for excess general medical costs. Indirect costs resulting from increased absenteeism, reduced productivity, disease-related unemployment disability, and loss of productive capacity due to early mortality totaled $58 billion. This is an increase of $42 billion since 2002. This 32% increase means the dollar amount has risen over $8 billion more each year.
Importantly, the ADA believes those numbers may be understated:
The actual national burden of diabetes likely exceeds the $174 billion estimate because it omits the social cost of intangibles such as pain and suffering, care provided by non-paid caregivers, excess medical costs associated with undiagnosed diabetes, and diabetes-attributed costs for health care expenditures categories not studied.
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