Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
How well do different countries take care of their elderly and near elderly populations? A study by Macinko et al. (2020) provides some useful statistics. Methods Population of interest. Individuals aged 50 and above sampled across 23 high- and middle-income countries. Data. The data come from 2015 or 2016 years for the following data sets:…
Specialty drugs are often injectibles, biologic drugs, or other drugs that require specialized administration, handling, or ongoing clinical assessment. Specialty drugs are often more expensive than standard pharmaceuticals. As the use of specialty pharmaceuticals has become more common, a paper by Hill, Miller and Ding (2020) aims to quantify how much spending on specialty pharmaceuticals…
A paper by Buxbaum et al. (2020) examines changes in life expectancy in the U.S. and finds that life expectancy increased by 2.5 years between 1990 and 2015. These data on mortality came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) database. More interesting is that the…
Price increases have decelerated. While the cost of specialty drugs has continue to rise, the cost of traditional drugs is now falling. The net impact is modest changes in drug prices (<5%) since 2016. Hat tip: Drug Channels.
We all know that health care spending per person in the US is highest among all countries. But are these results consistent across age groups? That is the question posed by Papanicolas et al. (2020). Using 2015 OECD data from the US and 7 other high-income countries (i.e., Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland,…
Telemedicine and video-conferencing are helping to bridge the gap in access to care during the COVID-19 pandemic. These approaches, however, only work if patients have access to the technology needed to engage in telemedicine or videoconference visits. A paper by Roberts and Mehrota (2020) uses data from the 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) and finds…
Some people use opioids as a recreational drug. If people choose to ruin their own life, that is their problem. Others take opioids when prescribed from physicians and unwittingly become addicted. In either case, there is one scourge that may not fully be appreciated: parents who take opioids risk having their kids go into their…
RAND has an interesting report titled “The Future of Fentanyl and Other Synthetic Opioids.” What is truly startling is the rise in deaths due to synthetic opioids like fentanyl in the last 5 years: from 3,000 in 2013 to approximately 30,000 in 2018. In fact, synthetic opioids are now involved in twice as many deaths…
A new study by Choi et al. (2020) compares the health of individuals aged 55-64 in the US compared to England. They use data from Health and Retirement Study (HRS)–in the US–and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) for 2008-2016. Health is measured across 16 outcomes: 5 self-assessed outcomes, 3 directly measured outcomes, and…
Take a look at these two graphs. The first gives the number of new COVID-19 cases from John Hopkins University. It is a scary graph. The second graph is the number of COVID deaths from IHME. Not nearly as bad. CDC reported death numbers are similar. In fact, the number of deaths in recent weeks…