The cost is significant. It would mean that 110,000 people every single year would develop type 2 diabetes, who otherwise don't need to. They would have emergency hospitalizations. They would have amputations, and 7,500 of them a year would die. They would leave the workforce early. They would have higher costs of benefits for their employers. They would not pay the same amount of tax.
Very simply, I don't see how we can sustain the current levels of expenditures. As I mentioned, we'll spend $30 billion in direct health care costs associated with diabetes in Canada this year, and that rate is growing at 40% per decade. Within another decade, we'll be paying well over $40 billion, which I think is pretty close to the full federal transfer payments. It's absolutely not tenable.