National Medical Spending Attributable To Overweight And Obesity: How Much, And Who's Paying?

Abstract

We use a regression framework and nationally representative data to compute aggregate overweight- and obesity-attributable medical spending for the United States and for select payers. Combined, such expenditures accounted for 9.1 percent of total annual U.S. medical expenditures in 1998 and may have been as high as dollar 78.5 billion (dollar 92.6 billion in 2002 dollars). Medicare and Medicaid finance approximately half of these costs.