Between now and 2030, the costs involved to manage heart disease will triple to more than $800 billion a year, a report commissioned by the American Heart Association predicted. Treating high blood pressure will be the most expensive part of the cost, rising to $389 billion by 2030, the report projects, with overall heart disease rising 10 percent by then. The Heart Association CEO Dr. Nancy Brown said “This country has a choice to make: We can wait until people get sick and figure out how to treat them or we can focus on prevention.” Dr. Paul Heidenreich of the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in California and colleagues looked at current costs of heart disease, the U.S. population and trends in behavior and illness for the first such projection of heart disease costs. “Between 2010 and 2030, real total direct medical costs of cardiovascular disease are projected to triple, from $272.5 billion to $818.1 billion,” reads the report, published in the journal Circulation.
