Chronic diseases are taking a steadily increasing share of national health spending in the developed world, especially due to an ageing population and unhealthy lifestyles. Such conditions and treatments do not often seem as controversial and as high on the political, healthcare system and media‘s agenda, when compared to the very expensive cancer or orphan drugs, for example. Typically, drugs for chronic diseases are priced at very reasonable levels, yet are making a large budget impact, effecting significant percentages of the entire population. The total number of patients are growing from year to year as medicines improve in efficacy and patients live longer. Health spending on long-term diseases, is indeed a long-term problem for payers, who are now looking to reprioritise budgets in a difficult economic environment and also allocate more resources to prevention, earlier diagnosis, improved managed care, disease management, reducing wastage through better patient adherence and investing in one-off surgical procedures involving medical devices.