Report: Obesity Carries the “Weight” of Health Care Costs

Some researchers are blaming the swelling health care costs on the swelling waistlines of Americans—and they’ve got the statistics to back them up.

This week, the journal “Health Affairs” published the results of a comprehensive study conducted by several official U.S. agencies. The researchers found that obese people spend roughly $1,400 more on health care (per year) than do “normal weight” people. These results led the researchers to conclude that fighting obesity must be a top priority in the nation’s efforts at controlling health care costs.

For the study, the researchers analyzed federal data gathered in 1998 and then in 2006. They found that, in just this eight-year time span, the rate of obesity had increased by 37 percent. This means that 25 percent of Americans are now obese, which is defined as those having a body mass index of above 30.

This is key to the rising health care costs, they say, because obesity is expensive (medically speaking.) Obesity has been linked to high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and about one-third of cancers. Diabetes alone, they report, cost the nation $191 billion a year to treat. As Type II (dietary controlled) diabetes is almost totally caused by obesity, the cost-savings on diabetes treatments alone—minus obesity—would be tremendous they said in their report.

In addition, the researchers found that obesity-related illnesses and diseases even put a burden on Medicare and Medicaid. They estimate that 8.5 percent of Medicare’s and 11.8 percent of Medicaid’s healthcare payouts go to treat such obesity-lined conditions.

The results of this study represent the combined efforts of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), RTI International, and the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality and were announced at a CDC conference in Washington.

Present at the conference was former President Clinton, who gave his full support to finding solutions for the obesity epidemic in America and that is an important healthcare concern. In the report, RTI’s Eric Finkelstein concluded that without curbing the obesity epidemic it would be impossible to curb rising healthcare costs.