"Americans' widening waistlines are the main force
behind rising U.S. health care costs, a new study shows.
Between 1987 and 2002, the proportion of private health spending
attributable to obesity increased more than tenfold, researchers
report, from $3.6 billion to $36.5 billion.
In the year 2002, obesity-related medical care spending
accounted for 11.6 percent of all private health care spending
compared to just 2 percent in 1987, concludes an article
published today in Health Affairs.
"We can focus on obesity and we should be," said study
lead author, Kenneth Thorpe, the Robert W. Woodruff professor
and chair of the department of health policy and management at
Emory University in Atlanta. "We need to have the same type
of societal attention on this issue that we gave to smoking 20
years ago," Thorpe added. |
