Colman 2001 - "Cost of Obesity in British Columbia"

Colman, Ronald; Dodds, Colin; Wilson, Jeff
"Cost of Obesity in British Columbia"
January, 2001. GPI Atlantic
On the Web
Relevance: high

Direct costs for obesity-related diseases cost the British Columbia health care system at least CAN$217.3 million a year (2.6% of the health care budget) in 1997. This is a very conservative estimate, so a reasonably higher estimate is $380 million, or 4.5% of the provincial health budget. Note that obesity is defined as BMI>27 for the conservative estimate and BMI>25 for the high estimate.

Using the assumption that the direct health care costs are only 45.7% of the total economic burden of illness, obesity could cost a total of $475.5 million to $831.5 million each year. At the time of writing, $830 million was 0.9% of BC's GDP.

Method: The author uses Birmingham's method of population attributable fractions applied to the BC population and 1997 medical costs.

One way to update the numbers is to apply the average annual CPI for health care for BC. This makes the direct health costs in 2005 range from $265.2 to $467.3 million dollars.

                                                           

Year	CPI
1992	100
1993	103.2
1994	105.4
1995	106.3
1996	107.4
1997	108.8
1998	111.9
1999	114.4
2000	117.6
2001	121.3
2002	125
2003	127.5
2004	129.7
2005	132.8