Abid Aslam
WASHINGTON, Oct 3 2007 (IPS) – Life high off the hog is costing the U.S. economy more than 1 trillion dollars a year in lost productivity and medical treatment costs, according to a private foundation that says the toll can be avoided.
The rate of childhood obesity in the United States has tripled in the last 15 years. Credit: Robert Lawton
Seven chronic diseases cancer, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart disease, pulmonary conditions, and mental illness exact an economic toll of 1.3 trillion dollars a year, says the Milken Institute, a California think tank set up by junk bond billionaire-turned-philanthropist Michael Milken. Of that amount, 1.1 trillion dollars represents the cost of lost productivity.
If nothing is done, the annual loss could swell to nearly 6 trillion dollars by 2050, the institute adds in a new report, assuming that direct losses due to chronic disease would lead to smaller investments in education and training.
However, even modest improvements in prevention could help avoid 40 million cases of chronic disease and reduce the economic impact by 27 percent, or 1.1 trillion dollars a year, by 2023.
Were obesity alone to be curbed, the report says, 60 billion dollars a year could be saved in treatment costs and 254 billion dollars could be gained in increased productivity.
By investing in good health, we can add billions of dollars in economic growth in the coming decades, said Ross DeVol, the institute s director of health economics and lead author of the report.
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The good news is that with moderate improvements in prevention and early intervention such as reducing the rate of obesity, the savings to the economy would be enormous, DeVol added.
The report urges greater incentives to promote prevention and early intervention. This would include achieving a national healthy body weight and maintaining healthier lifestyles marked by improved diet, exercise, and not smoking.
Those recommendations come amid renewed debate stoked by electoral politics on how to broaden the reach of medical services and health insurance.
Most of the national policy discussion on health care is about financing mechanisms, said Ken Thorpe, an Emory University public health expert and executive director of the non-governmental Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease.
The urgent need to act now to reduce the amount of preventable illness as the country ages deserves equal focus, added Thorpe, whose own research provided the basis for the Milken report, released Tuesday with financing from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a lobby.
Real gross domestic product (GDP) could be as great as 37.9 trillion dollars by 2050 if reasonable disease prevention and management efforts are pursued, the report says. By contrast, GDP would amount to only 32.2 trillion dollars if current trends continue.
We now know the cost burden of chronic disease in our nation, and it s truly staggering, said Richard Carmona, the U.S. Surgeon General, or top government public health official, in 2002-2006.
For both the physical and economic health of our country, we must bring together all sectors to find new, innovative, and cost-effective ways to prevent chronic disease, Carmona said.
For many years, advocates of primary health care have assailed private insurers and Medicare, the main government health financier, for waiting for people to get sick and then spending billions of dollars a year on treating them. Prevention would be cheaper, they say.
Health analysts say the current approach reflects the needs of the U.S. population decades ago, when the principal financing mechanisms were set up. It also relies heavily on technologically driven interventions. Its supporters say this has made the U.S. medical system the envy of the world but critics say that for all its advantages, the system favours profit over prevention.
The report echoes others in saying the current system is out of date: The U.S. population is older, fatter, and more prone to preventable chronic disease at all ages than was the case 20 years ago. It follows that the system must change to meet current needs. And this, inevitably, will mean spending more money on low-tech prevention counseling rather than on big-ticket procedures.
The study provides no price tag for such a reorientation but supporters say the economic benefits will outweigh the costs.
Any funding that we spend to prevent chronic disease today will actually be a valuable investment with long-term dividends, said Carmona, the former surgeon general.
