Most stories about the costs of "gender affirming care" that pop-up using common search engines are circa 2015. Given the explosion in the number of procedures for "gender affirming care", it is curious that there has not been more recent data published.
One report from Johns-Hopkins that was published in December 2015 states:
In the first five years, the researchers found, providing health care
for transgender people cost between $34,000 and $43,000 per year of
quality of life; after 10 years, the cost dropped to between $7,000 and
$10,000 per year of quality of life. Emphasis mine
Let's assume a 20-year-old opts for "gender affirming care" and let's assume the lower prices through their entire life.
5 years * $34k/year = $170k
Years 5-through-10: 5 years times $20.5k (the midpoint)/year = $102k
Years 11-through-40: 30 * $7k/year = $210k
Total, assuming a 60 year life expectancy: $480k
For comparisons, death due to cardio-vascular disease has a typical end-of-life cost of about $25k. E-o-L is usually characterized as the last 365 days of medical costs incurred. Death due to cardio-vascular disease has the lowest end-of-life costs of all major causes-of-death. Approximately 25% of the patients who die of cardio-vascular events simply fall-over dead and the sum-total of their medical cost is the ambulance ride to be declared dead at the hospital.
Death due to cancer has a typical E-o-L cost of $100k. This is primarily due to the customized nature of chemo-therapy and the fact that many cancer drugs are "niche" products and the development costs must be amortized over relatively few patients.
Dementia also has an E-o-L cost of about $100k but they use the last several years due to the slow, progressive nature of the disease.
So if the costs today are similar to the costs nine years ago, one person who receives "gender affirming care" has an incremental cost similar to five, terminal cancer patients.
Oh, and the person who receive "gender affirming care" will eventually die and incur whatever costs that are associated with that event.
20% or more will kill themselves, so we'll save a bit that way, at least.
ReplyDeleteI baked that into the cake by assuming a total life expectancy of 60 rather than 80ish that somebody making it to age 20 might reasonably expect.
DeleteThat cutoff is remarkably similar if you look for the % of abortions because of incest or rape.
ReplyDeleteAfter a certain cut-off there is absolutely no information.
Kinda like they're hiding something.
And if you're interested it was less than 8% IIRR for both.