Health Care Costs Higher For Healthy Individuals Over Lifetime, Study Finds

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 07 Feb 2008 - 6:00 PDT

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Lifetime health care costs for obese individuals and smokers are lower than those for healthy individuals who live years longer, according to a study Monday on the Web site of the Public Library of Science Medicine, the AP/Boston Globe reports. For the study, led by economist Pieter van Baal of the National Institute of Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands and sponsored by the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, researchers developed a model to predict lifetime health care costs for 1,000 individuals in each of three groups -- obese individuals, smokers and healthy individuals. Researchers based the model on "cost of illness" data and disease prevalence in the Netherlands in 2003.

Obese individuals had the highest health care costs from age 20 to 56, and obese individuals and smokers had a higher rate of heart disease than healthy individuals, the study found. However, the study found that obese individuals and smokers had lower lifetime health care costs than healthy individuals because they died earlier.

On average, healthy individuals lived 84 years, compared with 80 years for obese individuals and 77 years for smokers, the study found. Healthy individuals on average had lifetime health care costs of $417,000, compared with $371,000 for obese individuals and $326,000 for smokers, according to the study.

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According to van Baal, the study indicates that government efforts to prevent obesity and smoking can lead to higher health care costs in the long term. He said, "Lung cancer is a cheap disease to treat because people don't survive very long. But if they are old enough to get Alzheimer's one day, they may survive longer and cost more." He said that, although researchers do not recommend that "governments stop trying to prevent obesity" and smoking, they should undertake such efforts to improve the health of residents, rather than to reduce health care costs (Cheng, AP/Boston Globe, 2/4).

An abstract of the study is available online.

NPR's "All Things Considered" on Tuesday included a discussion with van Baal about the study (Block, "All Things Considered," NPR, 2/5). Audio of the segment is available online.

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