Market for Bariatric Services Grows as Patient BMIs Increase
by Cheryl Haas
Whether the cause is super-sized portions, pedestrian-unfriendly suburbs, or too many hours in front of the computer (or some combination of the above), Americans are becoming bigger at an alarming rate. The growing numbers of morbidly obese adults and children are fueling an increase in weight-loss surgery and medical weight-loss management services at hospitals across the country. As a result, bariatric surgery and related services are now at the forefront of many hospitals’ specialized offerings.
Demographic trends
According to F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2013, a report from the Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, adult obesity rates increased steadily for 30 years until 2005, when levels began to slightly taper off. In 2013, obesity rates remained level in every state except one. However, there’s no cause for celebration yet.
“The rates remain extremely high,” says Jeffrey Levi, PhD, Executive Director of TFAH, in the report. “Even if the nation holds steady at the current rates, baby boomers—who are aging into obesity-related illnesses—and the rapidly rising numbers of extremely obese Americans are already translating into a cost crisis for the health care system and Medicare.”
Just how high is high? The National Institutes of Health defines obesity as a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher. The TFAH report states that adult obesity rates have doubled since 1980 and childhood obesity has tripled. Rates of Americans with a BMI of 40 or higher have increased 350 percent in the past 30 years. And the increase varies by region: of the states with the 20 highest adult obesity rates, all were in the South or Midwest, with the exception of Pennsylvania. (For the first time in eight years, Mississippi was edged out of the highest rate, leaving that dubious honor to Louisiana.)