“More than half of Americans suffer from one or more chronic diseases. Each year millions of people are diagnosed with chronic disease, and millions more die from their condition. By our calculations, the most common chronic diseases are costing the economy more than $1 trillion annually – and that figure threatens to reach $6 trillion by the middle of the century.
“Yet much of this cost is avoidable. This failure to contain the containable is undermining prospects for extending health insurance coverage and for coping with the medical costs of an aging population. The rising rate of chronic disease is a crucial but frequently ignored contributor to growth in medical expenditures.”
– An Unhealthy America: The Economic Burden of Chronic Disease (courtesy of Milken Institute)