Type 2 diabetes is the fastest growing disease in the world. Nothing else comes close.

And the cost that insurance companies, governments, and individuals bear trying to manage this disease is staggering. You won’t believe the numbers you hear in today’s article.

The sad (or hopeful) fact is, that if these institutions came together and changed their approach – to something everyone agrees works – billions upon billions could be saved.

More importantly, millions of people suffering this disease could be healed.

A paper published in a 2013 edition of the journal Diabetes Care shocked the world. It proved that the American economy spent $245 billion on diabetes in 2012, including $176 billion on direct medical costs and $69 billion on reduced productivity due to absenteeism, disability, and early death.

To break this down further, of the $176 billion spent on direct medical costs, 43 percent went to inpatient hospital care, 18 percent went to prescription medicine to treat complications of the disease, and 12 percent went to anti-diabetic drugs and other medical diabetes supplies.

Spending $245 billion on diabetes in a country with a population of around 300 million people is intolerable. That means $816.60 per citizen per year on a disease that is preventable and reversible – using nothing but simple natural approaches.

On a personal level, each diabetic American spends around $7,900 per year on the disease, and before you become too nasty about it being their own fault, remember that food that causes diabetes is substantially cheaper and more easily available than healthy food. This is especially true for poor and disabled people who lack convenient transport to their nearest vegetable markets.

Furthermore, for those who want to jeer at those Americans with their poor lifestyles, other countries have almost equally terrible statistics with Britain, for example, spending £23.7 billion on diabetes in 2011, adding up to £395 per citizen per year.

The aspect of these studies that shocked health experts the most was the amount of money spent on secondary diabetes complications that tend to arise only in the serious, and mostly untreated, cases. These include limb amputations, organ transplants, stroke, and heart failure; conditions that are not inherent parts of diabetes and that will not arise if the diabetes is diagnosed and treated early. The British study showed 79 percent of the NHS diabetes budget is spent on such secondary complications.

Something must obviously be done, first to prevent diabetes, and second to diagnose and treat it when it occurs to prevent the further complications.

The necessary prevention strategy is no mystery. Almost all people visit physicians from time to time, sometimes for an unrelated illness, sometimes for a general checkup, and sometimes to qualify for tax breaks or medical insurance.

These physicians should screen people and apply lifestyle interventions for those who are at risk, or pre-diabetic, as the experts call it.

Several research teams have found lifestyle programs, which usually include physical exercise and dietary guidelines, to be extremely effective for the prevention of diabetes in pre-diabetics. In fact, it is more effective than the common medications on the market. For example, the Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group published such an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2002, and a team under Toshikazu Saito published another one in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 2011.

A literature review lead by Rui Li and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine proposed that when the average cost of such a program is calculated from a total of 28 published studies, each treated person would cost the system $653 when treated as an isolated individual. When people are treated in a group setting, it costs $417 per person, and when the programs are implemented in community or primary care settings, it costs $424 per person.

This shows clearly that prevention is cheaper than cure, and even if insurance companies paid for all costs involved in natural intervention, it would cost them less than traditional medical care.

Over all, the economy will earn a lot more than it spends if it keeps these people healthy.

At a personal level, an intervention that costs you $653 or $417 per year is certainly preferable to a gigantic bill of $7,900 per year for diabetes treatment. While your medical insurer still works this one out, it will be your responsibility to pay it, but your improved quality of life without diabetes makes it worth your while.

Did you know healing type 2 diabetes doesn’t have to cost you anything? In fact, it can be cheaper to follow this step-by-step strategy to naturally heal your type 2 diabetes than the lifestyle you are living today…