Extreme heat will cost the U.S. $1B in health care costs

Extreme heat could cost the U.S. economy an additional $1 billion in health-care expenses in the near future, according to a new report from Virginia Commonwealth University.

“One of the key goals of this report is to help the public understand the implications of extreme heat on health,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, M.D., a professor at the VCU School of Medicine and coauthor of the report, which was published by the Center for American Progress. “Unless we take action to mitigate the effects of climate change, heat events are projected to keep increasing in frequency, resulting in an even greater blow to public health.”

The harmful health effects of extreme heat include heat-related illness from dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Extreme heat also affects people with heart disease, pulmonary disease and other chronic problems, whose health can further deteriorate when exposed to hot conditions. These people often are treated in an outpatient setting or the emergency department, and if they are sick enough, they will be admitted to the hospital.

Researchers used available data in Virginia to estimate the increase in health-care use associated with extreme heat, such as emergency department visits, hospital admissions and the costs these services generated. Daily climate data collected from 15 weather stations serving Virginia showed that an average of 80 heat event days occurred each summer from 2016 to 2020. Based on insurance claims data from Virginia’s All-Payer Claims database, researchers calculated that heat events each summer result in:

• Almost 400 additional ambulatory care visits for heat-related illness;
• Nearly 7,000 additional emergency department visits, including more than 4,600 visits for heat-related or heat-adjacent illness; and
• About 2,000 extra heat-related hospital admissions, mostly for heat-adjacent illness.

Related: The human and workplace cost of climate catastrophes

Extrapolated nationally, the researchers estimate that heat event days would be responsible for almost 235,000 emergency department visits and more than 56,000 hospital admissions for heat-related or heat-adjacent illness, adding approximately $1 billion in costs every summer.

The average heat-wave season today is 49 days longer than it was in the 1960s, with the trend expected to worsen in the coming years without a significant reduction in carbon emissions, the report said. By 2036 through 2065, U.S. summers may include an additional 20 to 30 days of extreme heat.

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been monitoring long-term weather patterns in the United States, and every decade since the 1960s has seen an increase in both the frequency and duration of heat waves,” said coauthor Dr. Stephen Fong, director of the VCU Integrative Life Sciences doctoral program. “While the situation now is not great, effects of heat are projected to continue to worsen.”