With the Health Care Reform Bill now enacted into law, there will be a significant cost encountered for health care as the many diabetic people who do not have medical insurance and cannot obtain insurance because of their pre-existing condition will have some form of support.

In a recent conference call, Kathleen Sebelius, Health and Human Services Secretary, advised reporters that the new program will bring immediate relief to millions of Americans who have pre-existing health conditions, such as diabetes and other diseases.

Most people do not know much about diabetes, a serious disease affecting more than 18 million adults and children in the United States. It is estimated by the nation’s health care authorities that in addition to the 18 millions diagnosed cases, there are also more than 6 million as yet undiagnosed, they have the disease but are not aware of it.

Diabetes is an incurable disease that in the majority of cases exists when a person has above normal blood sugar levels in their body that persist over a longer than normal amount of time. This condition is known as type-2 diabetes and accounts for about 90 to 95 percent of all forms of diabetes. The other main forms are Type-1 diabetes and Gestational diabetes. For many years type-2 was a disease occurring mainly in people of about 40 years of age and older but in recent years the incidence of diagnosis in people of much younger age has been increasing significantly.

Glucose exists in the blood quite naturally after eating and digesting food and is needed by the cells of the body in the metabolic process to provide energy that maintains all life processes.

Taking care of diabetes is an expensive undertaking. Publications of the Center for Disease Control state that the cost of diagnosed cases of diabetes for a recent year, 2007, amounted to $116 billion in direct medical costs and an additional $58 billion dollars for indirect costs, including expenditures relating to disability, loss of work, and premature death.

There is also a disease condition associated with diabetes called Prediabetes, which is the name given to those people whose blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not as high as those of diabetes. It is estimated that there are more than 57 million people with prediabetes in the United States, many of them not aware that they have it. Both diabetes and prediabetes are serious conditions that should be under the care of a physician who can monitor its progress and prescribe lifestyle changes and perhaps medication that can prevent the diseases developing to the extent that the well-known serious and life-threatening complications will begin to take hold.

Now growing to epidemic proportions in the United States, it is forecast that there will be more than 30 million people with diabetes by the year 2030 based on the current rate of diagnosis.

The United States is not alone in facing a threatening crisis in the growth rate of diabetes and the associated condition called prediabetes. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that the same thing is taking place in Mexico and Canada, the UK and other European countries, and in Russia, India, China and most economically developed and developing counties.

The lifestyle of the western world is the major factor of the increase of prediabetes and diabetes.