The True Cost of Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is expensive. Two people in one house with type 1 diabetes is really expensive! We are lucky and have really good insurance, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it costs any less. Plus, there are lots of other costs that can't be expressed in numbers. But since I'm a numbers kind of guy, let's start there.

Per Month:

1. Medical Insurance: $800 per month. Why is this so significant, you ask? Everyone needs insurance don't they? Not necessarily. Let's pretend for a moment that I am a healthy adult with an otherwise healthy family. $800 per month works out to $9600 per year. If I were healthy, I might have chosen a bargain plan at work at a cost of $4000 per year, or I might have chosen a major medical plan for as little as $40 per month ($480 per year). Then I would pay out of pocket for office visits (assuming I even went if I were healthy) and prescriptions. I've learned that you can negotiate a pretty decent cash price, and I figure a family of four paying out of pocket would spend $600 per year in office visits. Prescriptions would be pretty typical, antibiotics and such, and would run another $1000 or so to estimate on the high end. So, very roughly, diabetes costs us $7200 per year.
2. Life Insurance: $58 per month. I was lucky (and smart) enough to grab a life insurance plan while I could. If I weren't diabetic, I would just use the group life provided at work and buy the increments there. That's $700 per year.
3. Right now, I put $5000 per year into our HSA account. If I were healthy, I would probably do it anyway to balance the risk of having a major-medical plan, so that's a wash.
4. We spend $1440 per year on mine and Emma's pumps. That's just the pumps.
5. Pump supplies are nil (thank you A Plus), but batteries, Tegaderm, etc. are not. I put their cost at $300 per year.
6. Most of our diabetes prescriptions are covered at 100%, but insulin is not. $240 per year.
7. Office visits...yikes. Specialist visits are $50 a pop, and between Emma and me, that's $1000 per year.
8. Hospitals, labs, etc. $2000 per year.

So that's a pretty rough estimate, but it costs my family $12,880 more per year than it could potentially cost.

If you talk about the word "profit" with an accountant and a finance analyst, you'll get two very different answers as to what defines "profit." To an accountant, if your revenues exceed your costs, then you're profitable. To a financial analyst, profit only exists if the revenue you receive is the highest revenue possible AND it exceeds your costs. In other words, if I earned $500 making calculators, and it cost me $300, then an accountant calls that profit. If I could have made remote controls for $300, and sold them for $600, then the financial analyst says I have LOST $100. Makes perfect sense, right? They call this obtuse concept "opportunity cost."

There are lots of "opportunity costs" associated with diabetes:

1. I will never be an entrepreneur in all reality. I will be a slave to group health insurance. What is the cost associated with that? What if I could open a dog-grooming business and profit $100,000 per year? Not going to happen. I can't assume the risks of a start-up like most can. What if I was able to develop my big idea (a Lysol-type sanitizer in fogger form), and it ended up saving millions of dollars per year in costs associated with kids that get sick at day-care centers, in ball-pits, etc.? How much money is lost to parents staying home with those sick kids? You get my point.
2. What if my wife wasn't forced to give up her career to take care of a diabetic baby? Let's assume she earned $40,000 per year, and Emma's been diabetic for almost 5 years now. That's $200,000 in lost income, and a reversal of $60,000 in costs for a net $260,000 swing. That's big money folks.

• What are the emotional costs?
• What are the costs in terms of the morale of the caregivers? And in some cases, what are the costs associated with the loss of a marriage?
• What are the costs of parents that can't always attend their "healthy" kid's games?
• What if that third child that we might have had otherwise was the one that found the cure?

So in strictly financial terms, it's cost our family roughly $300,000 in cost and lost income. In emotional terms, it's been far greater.