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Weight Loss And Diabetes

March 29, 2012 by · Comments Off on Weight Loss And Diabetes 

Weight Loss And Diabetes, A pair of landmark studies demonstrated that weight-loss surgery may be the best solution for Type 2 diabetics with poor control over their blood sugar. So, now what? Experts say that diabetes care is likely to undergo a profound shift. But before diabetics get in line for space on the operating table, a lot of questions need to be answered.

Not least of those, say clinicians, is who will do those operations, how well and for how much. Bariatric surgery has exploded in recent years, and with that growth have come concerns about quality of care and patient safety.

While rates of post-operative complications and mortality are lowest at bariatric “centers of excellence,” those remain few and far between. HealthGrades, which produced a comprehensive look at bariatric surgery and its costs and quality, says that of 468 hospitals providing bariatric surgery that it evaluated, 107 ranked “best performers” and 100 were rated as “poor.”

At between $10,000 and $42,000 per procedure, it’s also not clear that the cost of bariatric surgery will be less than that of medications. At a time when the cost of healthcare is undergoing increasing scrutiny, being clinically better may not be good enough.

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