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The more common type of Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 (Non-insulin Dependent), rear its ugly head during a patient’s productive years. Aside from its direct impact on the person’s health, the expenses generated to maintain the health of the person with diabetes can actually drain his/her resources. Any savings can be wiped out by treating diabetes and its complications.
Although local data on actual costs of treating diabetes is not available, treating it has raised even the alarm for years in more affluent countries owing to its high economic toll. Consider this data from the American Diabetes Association:
- The total annual economic cost of diabetes in 2007 was estimated to be $174 billion
- Medical expenditures totalled $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.
- One out of every five health care dollars is spent caring for someone with diagnosed diabetes, while one in ten health care dollars is attributed to diabetes.
-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.
- In 2007, diabetes accounted for 15 million work days absent, 120 million work days with reduced performance, 6 million reduced productivity days for those not in the workforce, and an additional 107 million work days lost due to unemployment disability attributed to diabetes.
- Diabetes caused 445,000 cases of unemployment disability in 2007.
- The value of lost productivity due to premature death related to diabetes is $26.9 billion.
The American Diabetes Association admitted that the actual national burden may just exceed the $174 billion estimate when intangible social costs such as pain and suffering, unaccounted costs of unpaid caregivers (family members taking care of their diabetic patient), and many other excess medical costs of undiagnosed diabetes.
People with diabetes are hounded in all spheres of their lives with debt owing to expenses incurred in keeping them tipped on the healthier side. Although people with diabetes account for around 6% of the US population, the medical expenditures they incur are approximately 2.3 times higher than those without diabetes. In the hospital setting, $58.3 billion was spent on inpatient hospital care and $9.9 billion on physician’s office visits directly attributed to diabetes.
Treating chronic complications of diabetes such as peripheral vascular, neurological, cardiovascular, renal, ophthalmic, and many others have an average cost for a hospital inpatient day at $2,281. Overall, the total diabetes-related hospitalizations totalled 24.3 million days in 2007, an increase of 7.4 million from the 16.9 million days in 2002.
It cannot be argued that these data are untranslatable to other countries. The reality dictates that local figures may just be bigger. Diabetes is in fact a lifestyle disease, hereditary and ethnically-inclined wherein Asiatics are more predisposed than what the US data accounts for.
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