Diabetes Health Costs - Prevention is a lot cheaper than cure!

The long-term costs of Diabetes are now becoming apparent throughout the world and are incredibly high.

The direct costs will be medical visits, hospital tests and drug care with diabetes management.

Long term effects may include earlier than usual death, complications with other illnesses and a possible shorter working life.

Many studies have been done to put a Dollar value on the costs of Diabetes with some even giving indicative costs across countries; the results vary but it is obvious that Diabetes costs more than if a citizen was healthy - some indicators hint that Diabetes will Double or Treble the "normal" long-term medical care costs of a person. In addition there are the costs to society - a less healthy person may work less in the course of their life time.

One report is published in Research and Clinical Practice Volume 87(2010) on pages 293 to 301.

This report indicates Mean health expenditure per person with diabetes in 2010.

The costs vary from $683 in Saudi Arabia to $7383 in the US with $3575 in the UK.

We will assume a minimum cost of $1,000 / person for our example.

Reducing the number of cases of Diabetes by just 1000 will bring a saving of at least $1,000,000/year and probably a saving of close to over $40,000,000 in a lifetime (40 years of treatment)....

This is correlated by other documents such as at:

• United Health Group Diabetes Costs - costs of over $1,000/year.
• (Diabetes care, Vol 25, March 2002) "Estimated cumulative cost of managing complications of type 2 diabetes" ... approximately $25000 over 15 years of Diabetes.

Prevention is better and a lot cheaper than cure!