Quote:
Originally Posted by tag460
I sorry I was off on the facts and please note the lost in productivity by employees. In 2011 the total economic cost of overweight and obesity in the United States is $270 billion per year while the cost in Canada is about $30 billion a year, a new study shows. The $300 billion total cost in the United States and Canada is the result of: increased need for medical care ($127 billion); loss of worker productivity due to higher rates of death ($49 billion); loss of productivity due to disability of active workers ($43 billion); and loss of productivity due to total disability ($72 billion), said the Society of Actuaries (SOA). An SOA online survey of 1,000 adults found that 83% would be willing to follow a healthy lifestyle program if they received incentives from their health insurance plan.
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Not sure what value they put on lives lost to being hit by drunk drivers but we all pay these costs as well.
CDC:
Alcohol Abuse Costs U.S. $224 Billion a Year Does not include Canada.
By Maggie Fox
Updated:
October 17, 2011 | 2:13 p.m.
People who drink too much cost the U.S. economy $223.5 billion a year, and governments pay more than 60 percent of their health care costs, federal health experts reported on Monday.
Alcohol abuse kills 79,000 people a year, the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.
Most of the costs came from binge drinking, which the CDC defines as four or more drinks per occasion for a woman, and five or more drinks per occasion for a man.
“It is striking that over three-quarters of the cost of excessive alcohol consumption is due to binge drinking, which is reported by about 15 percent of U.S. adults,” the CDC’s Dr. Robert Brewer said in a statement. “Fortunately, there are a number of effective public health strategies that communities can use to reduce binge drinking and related harms, such as increasing the price of alcohol and reducing alcohol outlet density.”
Writing in the November 2011 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the CDC team, working with the consultant firm The Lewin Group, said they analyzed national data from several national studies to report on the costs of alcohol overuse in 2006, the latest year for which complete data was available.
They found most of the costs—72 percent—came from lost workplace productivity. Another 11 percent came from direct health costs, 9 percent could be attributed to law enforcement expenses, and 6 percent to costs from motor vehicle accidents.
Tobacco-Related Monetary Costs in the USA
Total annual public and private health care expenditures caused by smoking: $96 billion
-Annual Federal and state government smoking-caused Medicaid payments: $30.9 billion
[Federal share: $17.6 billion per year. States’ share: $13.3 billion]
-Federal government smoking-caused Medicare expenditures each year: $27.4 billion
-Other federal government tobacco-caused health care costs (e.g. through VA health care): $9.6 billion
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Annual health care expenditures solely from secondhand smoke exposure: $4.98 billion