I was fast walking with a guy who is married to a girl I know. So in a sense I know the boy too, but I know the 31 year old girl for the past 10 years and I know the boy for about 4/5 years. That’s the background.

When we went a little uphill, the young man started panting. I asked him..and he said “I have blood pressure problem”. I said ‘Is that not dangerous and it could lead to other things…he said “I have type 2 diabetes for about 9 months, and this bp was diagnosed about 3 years ago.

That was stunning. Diabetes and BP by the age of 32? He was living with that for the past 3 years..and he was overweight and panting when walking with a 55 year old not fit old man.

I then met the 2 of them and could take far more liberties with the girl and went over their life style, eating, work related stress….etc. and found that so many things could be changed. Of course they said ‘we have no time’. I was amused. They were both well paid. He was in a PR job and she was in a marketing role. Both had own cars, and were self driving, and were sure that they could not take any other mode of transport. Even in these ‘well-paid’ jobs, they were spending about 30% of their income on cars, fuel, etc. This was possible because they were not paying rent – her father had given them his ‘spare house’. That was saving them about Rs. 55,000 per month – the house being in the Western Suburbs of Mumbai, and a 2 bhk at that!

Then I asked the boy how much he was spending on medicines on a monthly and on an annual basis. He said Rs. 3100 per month and an annual check up costing about Rs. 8000!

Assuming he lived up till the age of 85 how much do you think he would be spending on this..in all his life time? We will come to that in a while.

Largely doctors do not translate the ‘illness’ into ‘costs’ in terms of rupees (dollars) basis, so you hear stupid things like ‘I do not have time’. What if the cost of illness was say Rs. 5.89 crores? will your eyes pop out? I think so.

So as usual I turned to the King of Calculators to design a calculator – just go and do a plug n play..and see what is the ‘economic advantage of being healthy…here play around:

The cost of a chronic illness