The health care costs of uncontrolled asthma in the United States are estimated to total $300 billion over the next twenty years, according to new research published online in the American Thoracic Society’s American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
After adding in the cost of lost productivity, Mohsen Yaghoubi and the co-authors of “The Projected Economic and Health Burden of Uncontrolled Asthma in the United States” calculate that the total costs of uncontrolled asthma during that time period will approach a trillion dollars ($963.5 billion in 2018 dollars). The authors also calculate that American teenagers and adults will lose more than 15 million quality-adjusted life years. A quality-adjusted life year is one year of perfect health, so it captures both the quantity and quality of years lived.
