Relative contribution of overweight and obesity to rising public hospital in-patient expenditure in South Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective Arguments to fund obesity prevention have often focused on the growing hospital costs of associated diseases. However, the relative contribution of overweight and obesity to public hospital expenditure growth is not well understood. This paper examines the effect of overweight and obesity on acute public hospital in-patient expenditure in South Australia over time compared with other expenditure drivers. Methods Annual inflation-adjusted acute public admitted expenditure attributable to a high body mass index was estimated for 2007-08 and 2011-12 and compared with other expenditure drivers. Results Expenditure attributable to overweight and obesity increased by A$45million, from 4.7% to 5.4% of total acute public in-patient expenditure. This increase accounted for 7.8% of the A$583million total expenditure growth, whereas the largest component of total growth (62.4%) was a real increase in the average cost per separation. Conclusions The relatively minor contribution of overweight and obesity to expenditure growth over the time period examined invites reflection on arguments to boost preventive spending that centre upon reducing hospital costs. These arguments may inadvertently detract attention from the considerable health and social burdens of overweight and obesity and from unrelated sources of expenditure growth that reduce opportunities for state governments to fund obesity prevention programs despite their comparative benefits to population health. What is known about the topic? Stand-alone estimates suggest that overweight and obesity are placing a considerable financial burden on the Australian public healthcare system. What does this paper add? Our findings challenge common perceptions about the relative importance of overweight and obesity in the context of rising public in-patient expenditure in Australia. What are the implications for practitioners? Consistent serial estimates of overweight- and obesity-attributable expenditure enable its tracking and comparison with other potentially controllable expenditure drivers that may also warrant attention. Explicit consideration of population health trade-offs in expenditure-related decisions, including in enterprise bargaining, would enhance transparency in priority setting.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".