American Council on Science and Health: What Does It Cost To Have A Non-Communicable Disease?
Chuck Dinerstein, senior medical fellow at the American Council on Science and Health, examines results of a PLOS Medicine study on health system costs across diseases and comorbid noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), noting, “The more diseases that we convert from lethal into chronic and the longer we can keep those people comfortable, the greater our expenditure. … For those cynics amongst us, the cost of treating a single disease was less for the elderly than the younger or mid-life patients, could it be that we tried less to treat these patients, or is it the length of chronicity that makes the difference…” (1/8).