The Hidden Cost of Cardiometabolic Disease in the Workplace
How diabetes, heart disease, and related risks silently drain productivity, drive up healthcare costs, and erode your bottom line
Chronic conditions—especially type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and related cardiometabolic risks—are a looming line item on every employer’s ledger. But while medical claims are visible on balance sheets, the real financial drain lies in stealthier areas: absenteeism, presenteeism, disability, and turnover. When you add it all up, these hidden costs often outweigh direct healthcare expenses.
Let’s uncover the full hidden price of cardiometabolic disease in the workplace and show how employers can reclaim thousands per employee through evidence-based prevention and a targeted approach to allocating wellness dollars for the largest bang for your buck.
Annual healthcare spending is soaring. Employers now shell out over $7,400 per employee per year, with total U.S. employer health spending projected to exceed $1.3 trillion in 2024. That’s just the starting point.
For diabetes specifically:
Direct medical and treatment costs for type 2 diabetes total around $306.6 billion, part of a staggering $412.9 billion in total economic costs (2022).
On a per-person basis, diagnosed individuals incur an excess of $12,022 per year in healthcare expenditures. That additional expense takes dollars from an employer’s bottom line.
Yet while these figures sound impressive, they’re just the surface—and what hides underneath is even more expensive.
The Direct Costs Employers Can See in Their Budget
The Invisible Drain: Indirect Costs
Absenteeism
The CDC estimates productivity losses from absenteeism alone account for $225.8 billion annually.
Just as a result of type 2 diabetes, employers lose:
$5.4 billion from increased absenteeism
$35.8 billion from reduced productivity at work (presenteeism)
$28.3 billion from disease-related disability
$32.4 billion in productivity lost to premature death
—totaling nearly $106 billion in indirect costs, on top of $307 billion in direct costs—or around $413 billion overall.
Presenteeism: The Silent Productivity Killer
When employees show up to work but aren’t fully functioning, losses mount. Goetzel and colleagues estimate presenteeism alone costs around $255 per employee per year and accounts for 20% to 60% of all health-related expenses.
On a broader scale, chronic health conditions and related productivity losses exceed $500 billion annually in the U.S.—that’s more than half a trillion dollars.
Total Productivity Drag
Workplace health promotion programs highlight just how heavy the cost burden is: productivity losses from presenteeism are estimated to cost the U.S. economy more than $150 billion per year, while absenteeism boosts annual costs by about $660 per employee.
Putting It All Together: The Full Financial Picture
Multiply these costs across a workforce, and the losses are staggering even before you factor in disability, turnover, or talent replacement.
Let’s use diabetes as an example:
Direct medical cost: ~$12,000 per diagnosed employee per year.
Indirect costs (absenteeism + presenteeism + disability + premature death): ~$13,000 per diagnosed employee per year (based on $106B indirect / ~10M working-age diagnosed adults)
Total impact: ~$25,000 per affected employee per year (combining direct and indirect costs).
Even healthier employees at risk still cost more than their peers. One study found that conditions like hypertension, obesity, and inactivity drive absenteeism costs ranging from $100 to $251 per employee per year for small employers and up to $486 for larger firms.
Why Traditional Wellness Programs Don’t Cut It
Generic wellness strategies like step challenges, weight loss contests, or gym subsidies, rarely tackle the heart of the issue.
These programs often are often based on loosely supported, proprietary algorithms and lack biomarker-based risk detection, so employees with early insulin resistance, elevated HbA1c, high ApoB or Lp(a) levels slip through unnoticed.
Awareness doesn’t equal prevention. Without targeted intervention, chronic disease progresses regardless of how many steps someone logs.
A Smarter Way Forward: Prevention Over Reaction
Proactive, data-driven approaches deliver results:
Guidelines-based screening that incorporates relevant clinical history, biometrics, and outcome-proven advanced biomarkers pinpoints high-risk employees before claims or complications surface.
Personalized care plans, within a culture of chronic disease prevention, reduce both human impact, and hard costs that wreck budgets.
A conservative 10% reduction in cardiometabolic risk could save thousands per employee annually, depending on their baseline risk profile.