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 The average diabetes patient now spends $2,790 more per year than
they did in 1987 - and more than half the additional spending is for
medications.
“People need to be mindful about the substantial increase in the
cost of diabetes, which has been partially fueled by the rising
prices of newer drugs,” said Xiaohui Zhou, a health economist at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who led the study.
Zhou and colleagues compared National Medical Expenditure Survey
data from 1987, 2000-2001 and 2010-2011.
The 1987 survey, involving 22,538 people, showed that diabetics
spent $2,588 per person more on healthcare than people without
diabetes. In 2000 and 2010, with more people responding (roughly
39,000 each time), the extra spending by diabetics rose to $4,205
and $5,378, respectively.
When the researchers accounted for factors like age, race, obesity
and type of care, 55 percent of spending by diabetic patients was on
prescription medication, 24 percent was for inpatient visits, 15
percent was for outpatient visits and 6 percent went toward ER
visits and other expenses.
The researchers also asked whether costs were higher because people
used health services more, or because the price of the service had
risen. The answer: both. Patients now use more medication, and the
costs of the drugs have also risen.
The increased cost of outpatient visits was mainly due to more
visits, and inpatient and ER expenses grew as a result of rising
prices, they write in the journal Diabetes Care.
The U.S. is not alone in facing this issue. “A growing trend of
increased spending on anti-diabetic prescription medications has
also been observed in other developed countries,” Zhou said in an
email.
Tim Dall, a managing director with IHS Life Sciences who studies the
economic side of diabetes care but was not involved in this
research, said the American Diabetes Association has previously
found that “a large portion of diabetes-related costs are associated
with the complications of diabetes rather than with treating
diabetes itself.”
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Zhou noted that new drugs and devices are constantly emerging and
“patients now receive a more complicated treatment regimen than the
past.” Some newer drugs are eight to 10 times the cost of older
drugs such as sulfonylureas, Zhou said.
Dall feels that while costs may be great, the benefits of new
developments are also substantial. “The average medical cost to
treat people with diabetes has been increasing over time, but
patients are getting better care and living longer,” he told Reuters
Health by email.
However, he said, if a certain regimen is working well for a
patient, there may not be a need to upgrade.
Zhou and Dall say more effort needs to be put toward diabetes
prevention and not merely management of the disease.
“This growing trend of diabetes cost is simply unsustainable.
Besides the efforts to bend the treatment cost, the efforts to
reduce the number of future diabetes patients are imperative,” Zhou
said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1K8OaIc
Diabetes Care, online January 15, 2015.
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