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disillusionedtoday at 12:59 AM3 repliesview on HN

>People with diabetes alone account for 60% of hospital expenditure

That number seemed too large to be true, and I think you might be conflating some numbers...

The NIH study about Economic Costs of Diabetes in the US in 2022 [1] states:

>For cost categories analyzed, care for people diagnosed with diabetes accounts for 1 in 4 health care dollars in the U.S., 61% of which are attributable to diabetes.

So, 25% of health care (not hospital) dollars in the US are apportioned to people with diabetes, and in 61% of those cases, the cause is directly attributable to diabetes itself.

Similarly, an NHS study [2] revealed that 60% of overall diabetes spend goes towards diabetes-related complications.

Finally, this presentation [3] states that: "hospital stays involving patients with diabetes contributed almost $83 billion or 23% of the total hospitalization costs in the United States," and, of course, not all of those were directly diabetes-related.

Obviously that is still a staggering amount of money spent on diabetes every year, and represents a huge burden on our healthcare system. But 60% for all hospital expenditure just doesn't track from my cursory Google-ing here.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37909353/

[2] https://www.diabetes.org.uk/about-us/news-and-views/cost-com...

[3] https://www.bu.edu/csmet/2020/08/04/healthcare-data-analytic...


Replies

mchusmatoday at 2:36 AM

Wild numbers. I already thought GLPs were huge but this makes me think it’s even larger.

ijustlovemathtoday at 1:17 AM

oof, that's what I get for commenting late! I was thinking of that 23% number.

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