Did you know that in South Texas…
- Nearly 76,000 people in the Rio Grande Valley have diabetes – enough to fill the Texas Longhorns football stadium to 75 percent capacity.
- 3 in 5 people with diabetes will visit an emergency room or the hospital this year.
- 1 in 4 people in the Rio Grande Valley don’t have health insurance. (That’s twice as high as the national average.)
- Every year, approximately $720 million is spent on diabetes care in Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Willacy counties alone. For the same amount of money we could:
- Buy every person living in those four counties an iPad – and still have close to 500,000 iPads left over.
- Purchase more than 25,000 cars.
- Buy houses for more than 2,500 families.
- On average, the cost of diabetes care in the Rio Grande Valley is $9,480 per person every year. That’s the equivalent of 18 months worth of food for the average family.
Did You Know?
The U.S. spends approximately $245 billion annually on diabetes care with $176 billion in direct medical costs, and $69 billion in indirect costs due to disability, work loss and premature mortality.4