Contingencies Online - November/December 2010

The Economics of
By John dawson, with Pierre-yves crémieux and Arindam Ghosh
can offering morbidly obese patients bariatric surgery as a covered procedure reduce their future health care costs?
nE in ThREE aMERiCan aDULTS iS OBESE.
That statistic from the National Institutes
of Health would be startling enough on its
own. But studies of American weight gain
from 2000 to 2005 show that rates of more
serious forms of obesity are outpacing obesity itself. Obe-
sity in all of its forms will soon eclipse tobacco use in its
impact on health care spending in the United States.
It’s clear that we can’t expect to change course by do-
ing what we’ve always done.
Perhaps it’s time to revisit traditional thinking about
treatment options for the most serious and costly forms
of obesity. New economic data demonstrate that offering
morbidly obese patients weight-loss surgery as a covered
benefit can reduce a health plan’s—and the country’s—
future health care costs.