On its website, NBC News (3/20, Fox, 6.32M) offers coverage of the Alzheimer’s Association’s recently-released annual report, which found that the disease has impacted 5.7 million Americans and that it costs the US $277 billion each year, excluding the cost of “unpaid time and effort of the people, mostly women, who are caring for spouses, parents, siblings, and friends with dementia.” The Association explained, “In 2017, 16 million Americans provided an estimated 18.4 billion hours of unpaid care in the form of physical, emotional and financial support – a contribution to the nation valued at $232.1 billion.”
Bruce Japsen writes for Forbes (3/20, 10.07M) that Alzheimer’s Association director of scientific programs and outreach Keith Fargo said that along with the prevalence of the disease, there is a “growing financial, physical and emotional toll on families.” Japsen adds that the report “comes as Republican members of Congress led by U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan consider cutting entitlement programs like Medicaid health coverage for poor Americans and Medicare health insurance for the elderly.”
U.S. News & World Report (3/20, Lardieri, 2.29M) says that for the second year in a row, the “total payments to care for people living with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are predicted to exceed a quarter of a trillion dollars,” based on the association’s findings. The estimated $277 billion “is an increase of almost $20 billion from last year”; and by 2050, “costs are expected to surpass $1 trillion.”