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July 17th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda TUESDAY, July 17 (HealthDay News) — Although patients do indeed
lose weight after bariatric surgery, health-care costs remain about the
same as they were before the procedure, according to a new study.
Bariatric surgery reduces the size of the stomach, which results in
significant weight loss. Most patients in the new study had undergone a
procedure called Roux-en-Y gastric bypass.
Previous studies had shown that many obese people who have this
procedure improve their health and reduce the cost of their care. In this
group of patients, however, costs did not go down, the researchers
said.
“These three-year findings suggest that the return on investment for
bariatric surgery isn’t seen,” said lead researcher Matthew Maciejewski,
from the Center for Health Services Research in Primary Care at the Durham
VA Medical Center, in North Carolina.
“It is possible, however, that if we could follow these [patients] for
another three to five years, cost reduction may be seen,” he said.
Bariatric surgery improved these patients’ health in the short term,
but without further weight loss or other lifestyle modifications, their
risk remains high, he added.
Maciejewski said these patients, like most patents who have weight-loss
surgery, gain much of the weight back, which may be why costs remain the
same as before surgery.
The report was published in the July issue of the journal Archives
of Surgery.
For the study, Maciejewski‘s team looked at health-care spending in
nearly 850 U.S. military veterans who had weight-loss surgery, comparing
them to a similar number of veterans who didn’t. The researchers analyzed
expenditures for the three years before and after surgery.
The researchers found that in the years before surgery, hospital
inpatient and outpatient costs for people who had bariatric surgery were
about $600 lower than for those who didn’t have the procedure. In the six
months before surgery, however, the costs were $28,400 higher, including
the operation.
Costs were almost $4,400 higher in the first six months after surgery,
but then dropped to about the same level as before the procedure, the
researchers found.
These findings, however, may only apply to this particular group of
patients, who were mostly male, older and sicker than other patients who
have weight-loss surgery, the researchers noted. In other groups, the
procedure may reduce health-care spending.
Dr. Mitchell Roslin, chief of bariatric surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital
in New York City, said patients should not be looking for a return on
investment from any medical procedure.
“We do this medical procedure to make people improve medically — get
rid of their diabetes, their sleep apnea — and feel better about
themselves and let them have an improved quality of life,” he said.
Roslin said the notion of cost reduction was something that “people
created to try to get coverage for bariatric surgery. I don’t believe, in
a system like ours, there will ever be a return on investment for any
medical procedure.”
More information
For more about weight-loss surgery, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
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