US  hospitals spent $83 billion in 2008 caring for people with diabetes, according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. In that year, nearly one of every five hospitalizations involved a person with diabetes.

This amount is 23 percent of what hospitals spent overall to treat all conditions in 2008. The expenditures included costs associated with more than 540,000 hospital stays specifically for diabetes and roughly 7.2 million stays for patients who had other conditions in addition to diabetes. For example, a person with diabetes may be admitted primarily for heart disease, kidney damage, infection, or foot or leg amputation.