The costs and consequences of obesity in Germany: a new approach from a prevalence and life-cycle perspective

Tobias Effertz (), Susanne Engel, Frank Verheyen and Roland Linder
Additional contact information
Tobias Effertz: Universität Hamburg
Susanne Engel: WINEG | Wissenschaftliches Institut der TK, für Nutzen und Effizienz im Gesundheitswesen
Frank Verheyen: WINEG | Wissenschaftliches Institut der TK, für Nutzen und Effizienz im Gesundheitswesen
Roland Linder: WINEG | Wissenschaftliches Institut der TK, für Nutzen und Effizienz im Gesundheitswesen

The European Journal of Health Economics, 2016, vol. 17, issue 9, No 8, 1158 pages

Abstract: Abstract With the steadily growing health burden of obesity in Germany, the measuring and quantification of its costs and relevant economic consequences have become increasingly important. The usual quantifications via previous cost-of-illness approaches mostly have several weaknesses, e.g., applying “indirect methods” by using “population-attributable fractions” to identify parts of costs that can be accrued to obesity, second using highly aggregated data and third often only displaying part of the costs. This article presents a new approach and a new estimation of the cost and consequences of obesity in Germany using claims data from a German health insurance company. A sample of 146,000 individuals was analyzed with both a prevalence and a life-cycle focus on the cost and consequences of obesity. With additional data sets, we calculate the deaths per year due to obesity, the excess costs per year and several intangible consequences usually referred to as “pain and suffering”. Our results show that the cost estimations of obesity in Germany so far have been largely underestimated. The annual direct costs of obesity in Germany amount to approximately €29.39 billion and the indirect costs to an additional €33.65 billion. A total of 102,000 subjects die prematurely each year because of obesity, and there is a significant excess of unemployment, long-term nursing care, and pain and suffering due to obesity. From a lifetime perspective, every obese man is equal to an additional burden of €166,911 and each woman of €206,526 for the social security system in Germany. Obesity due to unhealthy eating is thus about to replace tobacco consumption in terms of costs and consequences as the main hazardous lifestyle factor and thus should be more intensively focussed by public health policy.

Keywords: Obesity; Claims data; Burden; Social Costs; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I00 I11 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10198-015-0751-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:eujhec:v:17:y:2016:i:9:d:10.1007_s10198-015-0751-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10198/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10198-015-0751-4

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J.-M.G.v.d. Schulenburg

More articles in The European Journal of Health Economics from Springer, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().