Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
My colleagues at FTI have a new white paper out surveying health care leaders on trends to expect in 2022. The data come from a survey of 251 senior decision makers working in corporate communications, investor relations, public affairs, business development, R&D and marketing for healthcare and life sciences companies in the U.S. Some key…
In 2021, the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) approved 50 new drugs, either as new molecular entities (NMEs) under New Drug Applications (NDAs), or as new therapeutic biologics under Biologics License Applications (BLAs). FDA summarizes these approvals in their recently released report titled: Advancing Health Through Innovation: New Drug…
Recent news articles have spilled much ink about the current nurse shortage. According to Pew, due to nursing shortages “Hospitals nationwide are canceling nonemergency surgeries, struggling to quickly find beds for patients and failing to meet the minimum nurse-patient ratios experts recommend.” Nursing wages are rising as well. The Baltimore Sun reports that the University…
A paper by Ahmad and Anderson in JAMA last spring examined trends in the causes of death in the US. Below are the charts in terms of both the number of deaths and the share of total deaths. The data come from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). The…
According to a study Bovell-Ammon et al. (2021) in JAMA Open, the answer is ‘yes’. The authors use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), which tracks a nationally representative cohort of noninstitutionalized youths aged 15 to 22 years in 1979 through 2018. The authors used cumulative incidence function estimates to compare Blacks…
Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network (HCP LAN) is dedicated to moving the health care system from volume-based, fee-for-service reimbursement, to alternative payment models (APM). While there are a large number of different types of APMs, broadly, all of them shift more financial risk to providers while also linking reimbursement to quality of care.…