Caring for patients with diabetes is costing New Yorkers an estimated $6.5 billion a year, according to a new report by the city’s health department, which found that expenditures on hospitalizations and treatment for the city’s 500,000 diabetics are “skyrocketing.”

“Diabetes is not only hurting our health, it’s hurting our wallets,” the city’s health commissioner, Thomas Frieden, said. “The cost of treating diabetes is an unsustainable burden on our health system and economy.”

According to the Health Department, diabetics were hospitalized 20,438 times in 2003. The cost of these hospitalizations was $481 million, up from $242 million in 1990. In addition, the Health Department cited a number of complications from diabetes that added to the cost burden, including 3,000 amputations and 1,400 new cases of diabetes-related kidney failure.

There were 4,700 diabetes-related deaths in 2003, the department reported.

“It’s quite startling,” the director of the health department’s Diabetes Prevention and Control program, Dr. Shadi Chamany, said. “This is really a lot of money.”

Dr. Chamany said the costs are shared by insurance companies, taxpayers, employers, and individuals who pay out-of-pocket for health care.

“When you look at who’s footing the bill, all of us are paying into this,” Dr. Chamany said.

According to the report, New Yorkers with diabetes were hospitalized more often than the national average. There were 354 hospitalizations for every 100,000 New York City adults in 2002, compared with 200 nationwide (2002 is the most recent year for which national data is available). Health officials attributed the rates to the city’s high prevalence of diabetes and to environmental factors that lead to obesity.

The national diabetes epidemic came up during the Democratic primary presidential debate on Monday night. Governor Richardson of New Mexico attributed 33% of Medicare costs to diabetes, while Senator Dodd of Connecticut touted stem cell research as a way to deal with the chronic illness.

Yesterday, the executive director of the New York Business Group on Health, Laurel Pickering, said the number “seems high, but diabetes is very costly to treat.”

According to a recent report by the group, average annual hospital in-patient charges for patients with type 2 diabetes were $59,183 in 2005, up from $54,686 in 2004. Yesterday, the president and chief executive officer of the New York State Health Foundation, Jim Knickman, said his organization has committed $35 million to address the diabetes epidemic on a clinical, social, and environmental level.

“There’s no reason we can’t reverse the diabetes epidemic,” he said.