WASHINGTON – Payers will cover obesity treatment, people will suffer less from cardiometabolic disease, and the economy will be less burdened by the costs of untreated complications and lost productivity related to obesity. That’s the vision of Dr. Jeffrey I. Mechanick and his colleagues at the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the American College of Endocrinology, who’ve jointly released a consensus statement on obesity treatment.
In a video interview, AACE president Dr. Mechanick, discusses why payers haven’t covered obesity treatment as a matter of course in the past, but why they may going forward, and how a growing impatience with a fractured approach to obesity care spurred the AACE and ACE to create a cross-disciplinary conference that also included members of the nonmedical professions involved in obesity care.
"By limiting the conference just to the biomedical model, we wouldn’t have access to this type of information," Dr. Mechanick also of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, said in a press conference at the meeting. "We learned that different stakeholders require different levels of evidence."
The value of measuring body mass index is a controversial topic in obesity treatment. Dr. Mechanick explains why BMI will still be part of the developing ACCE/ACE standards of care and how it will be incorporated with other factors.