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Last Updated: Dec 27th, 2006 - 19:07:47 |
America’s widespread obesity problem is leading to more than expanding waistlines – it is also a huge contributor to ballooning health care costs. In a report released yesterday, researchers found the obesity-related health care cost increased by 1000 percent over a 15-year period.
According to a report published in Health Affairs, money spent treating obese patients rose from $3.6 billion in 1987 to $36.5 billion in 2002 – a tenfold increase. In 2002 alone, nearly 12 percent of all healthcare spending was aimed at obese patients.
Kenneth Thorpe, lead author of the study and chairman of the department of health policy and management at Emory University in Atlanta, compared the obesity epidemic with health concerns of previous decades. “We need to have the same type of societal attention on this issue that we gave to smoking 20 years ago,” Thorpe said, as quoted by ConsumerAffairs.com.
The spending increase cannot be blamed solely on patients’ burgeoning stomachs, Thorpe explained. “You can break health care spending into two things,” he said. “One is that we’re treating more people who are sick, and second is that is costs more to treat those patients.”
The enormous monetary increase is also the result of a growing list of ailments afflicting the overweight. Researchers claim in 2001, overweight people with private health insurance increased insurance outlays $1,244 per person when compared with normal-weight adults. In 1987, the difference amounted to $272.
Among the various medical conditions of obese Americans is Type 2 diabetes, which saw a 64 percent increase in the adult-onset form of the disease from 1987 to 2001.
The study shows that 15.5 percent of obese adults were treated for six or more medical conditions in 2001, nearly double the 1987 percentage.
Thorpe said the obesity problem is only going to worsen. “The costs are up because so many more Americans are obese and because they’re being more aggressively treated for weight-related illnesses,” he said.
The number of obese adults in the U.S. is about 31 percent, up from 23 percent in the late 1980s and 15 percent at the end of the previous decade. Obesity is defined as 30 or more pounds over a healthy weight, according to a report in USA Today.
Thorpe said medical professionals should focus on ensuring patients maintain a normal weight, as opposed to treating the ailments that inevitably accompany obesity.
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