Wow! As a diabetic, I know the enormous costs associated with combating the disease, but when you look at the whole national picture, the amount is phenomenal:

As diabetes is rapidly becoming one of the world’s most common diseases, its financial cost is mounting, too, to well over $200 billion a year in the U.S. alone.

A new study, released Tuesday exclusively to The Associated Press, puts the total at $218 billion last year — the first comprehensive estimate of the financial toll diabetes takes, according to Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk A/S, which paid for the study.

That figure includes direct medical care costs, from insulin and pills for controlling patients’ blood sugar to amputations and hospitalizations, plus indirect costs such as lost productivity, disability and early retirement.

Just to give you an example of the costs, blood testing. I am still in the early stages so I only test three times a week. Many out there test that many times per day. The test strips alone average $1 per strip. If someone has to test three times a day, that comes out to almost $100 in a single month. A lot of insurance companies don’t cover this either, so people are stuck covering it out of pocket. Yeah our health system is great…