How are you?

£1m per hour, or 10% of annual spend, is what the NHS is paying to treat diabetes and its complications, according to a BBC News article out yesterday.

Yikes that's a lot of cash. That's £24m per day. Or £8.8bn per year.

And that's just 10% of it.

So multiply it by 10 and the NHS budget is actually £88bn per year on this basis.

Although HM Treasury says that this figure is closer to £111bn.

UK GDP - a pretty good measure of how much money our economy generates each year - is estimated at just £1.4 trillion. Drilling down a bit further, total Government revenue in 2007/08 was 39.2% of this - or £548bn.

So the Government is currently paying out over 20% of ALL the money it receives from companies and individuals - many times over if you look at the combinations of direct and indirect taxes that we all end up paying on the goods and services we ultimately receive.

That's got to be more than defence. Oh yes, so it is. Over 3 times as much. Only 'Social Protection' is higher at £169bn. That's for old age pensions, unemployment and so on.

So illness, old age and unemployment make up nearly half of our taxes.

Or to put it another way, nearly half of what I pay to the government goes on looking after my health and making sure I'm able to work for as long as possible. And I'll only really be able to work as long as possible if I'm healthy - which I'll do my best to do, especially given how low the pension payments to individuals are.

So: looking after our health really is the single most important thing we can do.

No wonder most conversations start with 'how are you?'.