Wow. Just in workplace costs? Obesity is a serious problem.
http://jan.ocregister.com/2010/10/10/work-obesity-costs-73-1-billion-a-year/46814/
Obesity among full-time U.S. employees costs an estimated $73.1 billion annually, according to a new study by a researcher at Duke University in North Carolina.
Duke said this is the first study to quantify the total cost of lost job productivity as a result of health problems, which the study found to be more costly than medical expenditures. But either way, the employer bears the brunt of those costs.
The results of the study led by Eric Finkelstein has been published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
The study was supported with funding from Irvine-based Allergan, Inc., which makes The Lap-Band, a gastric banding medical device for weight loss in the United States and sells outside the United States the BIB non-surgical balloon system for treatment of obesity.
The findings are in line with a 2007 Milken Institute study that said 70% of health costs — more than $2 trillion a year — are related to lifestyle, including poor diet and lack of exercise.
The Duke study considered three factors:
* employee medical expenditures * lost productivity on the job due to health problems, which it called “presenteeism” * absence from work, called absenteeism.
The per-capita costs of obesity are as high as $16,900 for women with a body mass index above 40 (roughly 100 pounds overweight) and $15,500 for men in the same BMI class.
Presenteeism is the largest cost, accounting for as much as 56% of the total cost of obesity for women and 68% for men, Finkelstein said.
Presenteeism was measured and monetized as the lost time between arriving at work and starting work on days when the employee was not feeling well, and the average frequency of losing concentration, repeating a job, working more slowly than usual, feeling fatigued at work and doing nothing at work.
Even among those in the normal weight range, the value of lost productivity due to health problems far exceeded the medical costs, according to the study.
Finkelstein used the 2006 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and the 2008 US National Health and Wellness Survey.
“Much work has already shown the high costs of obesity in medical expenditures and absenteeism, but our findings are the first to measure the incremental costs of presenteeism for obese individuals separately by BMI class and gender among full time employees,” said Finkelstein, associate research professor of global health at the Duke Global Health Institute.
When all costs of obesity are combined, individuals with a body mass index greater than 35 account for 61% of the costs, yet they only represent 37% of the obese population. “The disproportionately high per capita and total cost of (this group) is particularly concerning given that these BMI ranges are the fastest-growing subset of the obese population,” said Marco daCosta DiBonaventura of Kantar Health, a co-author of the study.
In a separate survey, Gallup said 26.6% of American adults are obese, a percentage that has remained fairly steady for almost two years. Click here to read the survey results.
“Given that employers shoulder much of the costs of obesity among employees, these findings point to the need to identify cost-effective strategies that employers can offer to reduce obesity rates and costs for employees and families,” Finkelstein said. To counter obesity in the workplace, he recommended that employers:
* promote healthy foods in the workplace * encourage a culture of wellness from the CEO on down provide economic and other incentives to those employees who lose weight, work to maintain healthy weight and/or exercise
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