Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Private equity investments have grown in health care in recent years. According to Appelbaum and Batt (2020), whereas in only 4.7% of leveraged buy-outs (LBO) were in health care in 2000, that number had risen to 12.2% in 2019. A 2022 white paper finds that investments in health care have risen even more: The number…
A paper published earlier this year by the Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators in The Lancet aims to quantify the size of the problem. The authors used a variety of data sources including systematic literature reviews, hospital system data, surveillance systems, and other sources. The authors estimated that these data covered 471 million individual records or isolates.…
Back in 1960, life expectancy in the US was 69.7 years as compared to 43.7 years. At the turn of the century, this gap had closed to 76.8 to 71.4 years. As of 2021, however, US life expectancy was 76.1 whereas life expectancy in China was 77.1, a full year ahead of the U.S. Part…
Perhaps not, but there is some sobering news from the United Nation’s 2021/2022 Human Development Report that was released this week. BBC reports: Over the past two years, nine out of 10 countries have slid backwards on the UN’s Human Development Index. Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and the impact of climate change are blamed for…
How have medical expenditures varied over time and across states? That is the question being asked by Johnson et al. (2022) in a recent Health Affairs paper. The authors use State Health Expenditure Accounts data between 1999-2014 and then extrapolate these trends forward with a regression-based approach to predict State spending through 2019. Using this…
Some COVID-19 news updates. 66.5% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. 12.09 billion doses have been administered globally, 5.74 million COVID-19 vaccines are administered each day. Only 17.6% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. There have been approximately 550 million cases of COVID-19…
Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds came out with their annual report on the state of Social Security and Medicare. First a few takeaways on the Medicare side. Overview of Medicare Part A and B Finances The Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund, or Medicare Part…
Cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death in the US, just behind heart failure. Yet in recent years, we have seen that improved prevention, screening and treatment has helped to avert 3.5 million deaths in the US over the past 3 decades. Despite these gains, we do see that cancer death rates are highly…
In the short-run, the answer is likely ‘yes’. As COVID-19 (hopefully) slows and if economic growth remains strong, health care spending will fall as a share of the US economy. At least this is what the Office of the Actuary (OACT) at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) thinks in their Health Affairs study…
That is the title of an editorial by Ramanan Laxminarayan published in The Lancet this week. Part of the rationale from this commentary is a recent study also published this week from the Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators (2022). Undertaking a systematic review of the mortality impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) the authors find: …there were an…