This is a catastrophe in the making.
“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 by the year 2034,” 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.
It’s not just the public health plans like Medicare that will be strained past the breaking point. Private insurance, assuming it has survived the next 25 years, will be subjected to the very same pressures.
It’s also worth mentioning that diabetes is the primary cause for a projected doubling of U.S. heart disease cases between 2000-2050. Diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease are all parts of one pattern, referred to as metabolic syndrome.
