Elderly people’s falls – even minor ones – cost the US more than $50 billion a year, new CDC research has revealed.
About every 11 seconds, an elderly American falls down, and 300,000 people over 65 are hospitalized for fractured hips every year.
Falling drastically increases the risk of other illnesses, injuries and even death for older people, many of whom get their insurance through through Medicare.
New research from the CDC found that that these injuries come at a massive cost – not only to the people that they effect, but to the US government.
More than 300,000 people over 65 fall each year, costing the US $50 billion
More than 44 million people in the US are insured through the government-subsidized Medicare, which offers relatively low-cost coverage to people over 65.
In 2016 alone, the government spent $672.1 billion on Medicare, accounting for 22 percent of national health expenditures.
Falls that were not fatal cost Medicare $28.9 billion in 2015, according to the new research, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
Medicaid spending on nonfatal falls totaled $8.7 billion in the same year.
The American population is aging, driven by the large baby boomer generation.
About 15 percent of the population is over 65 and another, and another 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day, the CDC study notes.
One in four of those aging adults will fall at some point in their life.
Falls become more likely and more dangerous with age as eyesight worsens, muscles weaken and the body becomes more frail and less resilient.
They often result in hip fractures, which raise the risk that a person will die in the next year by between 14 and 58 percent, according to statistics from the National Institutes of Health.
The CDC has previously reported that the average cost of a trip to the hospital for a fall injury is around $30,000.
Health care for the elderly falls between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, a quarter of all seniors in the US reported last year that they fear they cannot afford health care.
On the other, annual Medicare spending is only set to increase, and experts have predicted that the program’s funds for inpatient hospital care, skilled nursing facilities, hospice, lab tests, surgery and at-home health care will run out in 2029.
According to the new study, ’75 percent of the cost of older adult falls is financed through public health insurance program that are already financially stressed.’
Almost 99 percent of those costs were linked to nonfatal falls, which study authors considered ‘risk factor for greater health care spending’ in the future.
The authors also wrote that when elderly people fall, the repercussions are likely to extend well beyond what their research was able to quantify, having negative effects on the quality of life and finances of care givers, for example.
The CDC urged that ‘preventive strategies that reduce falls in older adults could lead to a substantial reduction in healthcare spending.’
In the new report, the agency encouraged old but tried and true approaches to cutting the risk of falls for elderly people, including regular check-ups, strength and balance exercises and careful medication management.
Some exercise programs like the recommended ones are covered by Medicare, and may reduce the risk of falling down by as much as 24 percent, according to the researchers.
The CDC has mounted its own effort against falls, introducing a program called Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths and Injuries (STEADI), which is specifically designed to help assess the risks that an older person will fall and provide information about preventive strategies.
‘By broadly implementing and scaling up initiatives like STEADI, we can improve health and decrease the future economic burden of older adult falls,’ the CDC advised in the new study.