Providing surgical treatment for people who are morbidly obese could save British taxpayer-funded health services and the wider economy hundreds of millions of pounds a year, leading surgeons said yesterday.
In an economic impact assessment of obesity surgery, Britain’s Royal College of Surgeons and the National Obesity Forum said the financial toll of unemployment, welfare payments, hospital costs and prescriptions caused by obesity could be cut if more patients had weight-loss surgery.
The report was written by an independent consultancy called the Office of Health Economics and funded by the health firms Allergan and Covidien, both of whom make medical equipment used in weight-loss, or so-called bariatric, surgery.
Bariatric surgery is performed on people who are dangerously obese, as a way of trying to help them lose weight. The idea is to reduce the size of the stomach, either with a gastric band or a gastric bypass that re-routes the small intestines to a small stomach pouch, or by removing a portion of the stomach.
Critics of weight-loss surgery say its long-term risks are largely unknown, particularly in children, and argue that it should be a last resort for morbidly obese people who have failed to lose weight by changing their diet and lifestyle.
The British report said that if 5 percent of eligible UK patients were given weight-loss surgery on the taxpayer-funded National Health Service, the gain to the economy within three years would be £382 million (US$587 million). If 25 percent got surgery, the gain in three years would be £1.3 billion.
On top of that, it said, the government could also expect to save between £35 million and £150 million in welfare payments as people were able to return to work.
A study in the British Medical Journal last month found that use of weight-loss surgery has increased 10-fold in hospitals in England since 2000, and that those who have gastric bands fitted can reduce their risk of early death and cut health service costs.
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