Obese Americans have increased the cost of health care, but it is not only the health care cost that has gone up because their weight, but also the costs associated with their workplace.

A research provided by the Duke University says that overweight Americans cost their employers around 73.1 billion dollars a year more than the ones that have normal weight. The researchers from the Duke University used data from the 2006 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and the 2008 U.S. National Health and Wellness Survey to estimate how much extra money are spent because of the obese full time employees when it comes to absenteeism , work productivity and medical costs. Many of the studies performed before looked only at the medical cost of the extra weight health care, but lead researcher Eric Finkelstein, deputy director for health services and systems research at Duke-National University of Singapore, and his colleagues discovered that presenteeism costs employers about 12.1 billion dollars per year, double the amount that is needed for the overweight health care. Presenteeism is described as the loss of productivity caused by a person which tries to work and ignores his or her health problems.

Finkelstein is the only one not to analyze only the high costs of obesity in medical expenditures and absenteeism, but to also measure the costs of presenteeism among obese and overweight employees and to divide them by body mass index and gender. Presenteeism seems to be the largest cost when it comes to employees no matter their weight, but obese workers are actually causing the majority of the losses related to presenteeism, absenteeism and medical expenses. And the more they weight, the more damage they cause: obese individuals with a body mass index greater than 35 are to “blame” for 61 percent of all obese employee costs, although they only represent 37 percent of the overall obese population. Individuals with a body mass index greater than 40, which means that they are well over 100 pounds, cost employees 16,900 dollars per capita for women and 15,500 dollars for men. Dr. Finkelstein’s study only repeats what other studies have shown before: if obesity is not going to be dealt with soon and people will not start to make efforts to control their weight there is no chance that the medical health care services will get cheaper.

Dr. David Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, says that the studies on this subject are not able to capture the costs very accurately, but they are useful because people might become aware of the problems caused by a common condition in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that the medical costs required by obese people each year are estimated to about 147 billion dollars, and that the costs have increased very much on a short period of time. Over the last five years, the costs of obesity have increased by 80 percent. The trend has been the same as it has always been: obese people have always caused higher cost when it comes to medical care, but Dr. Finkelstein’s study point out that there are hidden costs that nobody ever thought about before: the costs from the workplace, supported by employers. Dr. Mitchell Roslin, a bariatric surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, says that the message people have to get from this studies is quite clear: there are two issues that have to be taken care right now, education and health, and people have to take care of themselves at some extent when it comes to these issues, because the government can not support each and every individual.

It has been observed that education and health go hand in hand, because it is the people that have a poor household income, hence bad jobs, hence bad education that have the highest obesity percentage. Diet experts say that any change for the better is likely to improve health outcomes for employees, raise productivity and also lower medical costs for employers. Weight loss is associated with better health and less money spent on health care and medication. Some specialists worry that the publishing of these studies might lead to discrimination against obese employees. A research published by Yale says that people would rather hire a convicted felon, than a person with severe obesity, so it might become very hard for obese people to find a job.