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U.S. Diabetes Cases To Double, Costs Triple By 2034
Diabetes costs could further strain nation’s health system. Written By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters)
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y 2034, nearly twice as many Americans will have diabetes and spending on the disease will triple, further straining the nation’s health system and testing the viability of Medicare and other government health insurance programs, U.S. researchers said last month. “We forecast that in the next 25 years, the population size of people with diabetes—both diagnosed and undiagnosed—will rise from approximately 24 million people to 44 million people,” said Dr. Elbert Huang of the University of Chicago, whose study appears in the journal Diabetes Care. “We anticipate that the cost of taking care of those people—and these are direct medical costs—will triple over the same period of time, going from $113 billion today to $336 billion [per year],” Huang said in a telephone interview. Huang said the burden of treating so many people with diabetes will strain the viability of Medicare, the U.S. health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. Huang projects that the number of people covered by Medicare will rise from 8.2 million to 14.6 million, and annual Medicare spending on diabetes will jump from $45 billion to $171 billion. In the United States, about 11 percent of adults have diabetes. Most have type 2 diabetes, the kind closely linked to obesity. The rising diabetes burden could further complicate efforts to rein in U.S. health care spending in the coming decades. Congress is currently grappling with legislation to extend health coverage to millions of uninsured people, control health care spending and bar insurance industry practices such as denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. “Diabetes is a major public health problem right now, but it’s important for the country and for policymakers to have an idea of what will happen in the next couple of decades,” Huang said. “We already have a financial crisis at hand in health care, and we need to plan for how we can deal with those costs in the future.”
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In the United States, about 11 percent of adults have diabetes. Most have type 2 diabetes, the kind closely linked to obesity. For the study, Huang and fellow researchers built a model of diabetes population costs that can forecast how many people will develop diabetes over the next decades and how much it will cost. The model accounts for the size of different generations that will be entering the diabetes population. “That is important to account for, because we know that age itself is a major predictor of diabetes, and we know that the baby boomer generation is entering an age where there’s a high risk of developing diabetes,” Huang said. The model also assumes that no progress is made in terms of rates of obesity, diabetes prevention and diabetes care. If obesity levels rise, Huang said, the model may actually underestimate the problem. The report emphasizes the importance of public health efforts already underway aimed at reducing the number of people who have diabetes. Says Huang: “We know from a recent trial—the Diabetes Prevention Program— [that] we can prevent diabetes through diet and exercise.” In that 10-year study, overweight people with elevated blood sugar levels who lost a modest amount of weight lowered their risk of developing diabetes by at least a third. People over age 60 got even more dramatic results, cutting their risk of diabetes during the study period by about half. According to Huang, “Preventing diabetes is the first step.”