Exercise? May be another time: The Cost of Sedentary Life Styles
- Presenter:
Chair: Jeffrey Pyne; Discussant: Jeffrey Pyne Mon June 5, 2006 17:15-18:45 Room 309
Physical inactivity, one of the major health issues in the modern world, is estimated to cause 1.9 million premature deaths worldwide annually. Globally, it is identified as a cause of 10 to 16 percent of breast cancer, colon cancers, and diabetes, and about 22 percent of ischemic heart disease. Therefore, physical inactivity is a major contributor to the rising healthcare costs. Only in the USA estimated healthcare cost due to physical inactivity was around $75 billion in 2000. In Canada, physical inactivity accounts for about 6 percent of total healthcare costs. Although the level of inactivity showed a decrease from 62 percent in 1994 to 56 percent in 2001, two-thirds of Canadians aged 25 to 55 are not physically active enough to meet the guidelines for sufficient physical activity set out in the Canada’s Physical Activity Guide. Therefore, physical inactivity continues to be a burden on collectively funded health insurance system of Canada.
Physical activity improves health status and has the potential to reduce disability days and utilization of expensive healthcare services. Increase in healthcare costs can be controlled with health promotion efforts aimed at changing life styles of individuals. Such health promotion efforts have the potential of increasing life satisfaction and at the same time saving money for the society.
This area of research has been neglected by economists, and the estimates provided above are based on the cost of illness studies. These studies do not consider impacts of choices made now on future resources; therefore estimates are not calculated by taking lifetime costs and benefits into account. The aim of this paper is to estimate the healthcare costs and productivity loss due to sedentary life styles, and to calculate the lifetime cost savings if inactive people would instead be active throughout their life. We, therefore, estimate implied benefits from a health promotion program aimed to change life styles of inactive people.
The paper uses the Canadian Community Health Survey 2.1, which includes population level information on health determinants, health status and healthcare utilization. The sample size is approximately 130,000 Canadians and provides information at the level of provincial health regions. The dependent variables are non-negative count of health service utilizations and disability days. The sample mean and standard deviation are quite different, suggesting that the over-dispersion can cause a downward bias in the standard errors resulting from Poisson estimation. At the same time, the dependent variables take zero for a significant proportion of the sample. As a solution, we use zero inflated Poisson and/or Negative Binomial models.
Our results show that physically inactive people use more healthcare services compared to the active group. The range varies from 18 to 78 percent depending on the type of care. And the same pattern is true for disability days, around 43 percent more for inactive group. After obtaining estimates from the regression analysis, we estimate implied savings under the assumption that inactive people will become active throughout their life.
