Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
On this Labor Day, below find some interesting statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) on health care wages and employment. From the first graph, one can see that health care practitioners (e.g., physicians, nurse) have much higher wages than average but health care support workers (e.g., ) have…
The 2021 Medicare Trustees Report–formerly known as the “Annual Report of the Boards of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund and the Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund“–had some grim news. Expenditures ($925.8 billion) exceeded revenues ($899.9 billion) in 2020. More worrying, the estimated depletion date for the Medicare (i.e., Hospital Insurance) trust…
In a previous post, I answered this question from the perspective of government agencies: According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the answer is $10 million. Other agencies place use a somewhat lower number. The Food and Drug administration pegs the value at $9.5 million and the Department of Agriculture places the value at $8.9 million. However,…
Conventional wisdom holds that the prices of pharmaceuticals are higher in the US than in other countries. But is that really the case? And if so, by how much? Which price? The question we need to answer is “which price” do you mean? There is the manufacturer wholesale price (i.e., gross price) which is how…
This weekend I received my second COVID-19 vaccine. While I certainly feel lucky to live in a country with ample vaccine supply, other countries are not so lucky. Let’s take a look at the numbers from the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. These numbers are updated through May 2, 2021. First, you’ll see that…
Here are a few highlight’s from the March 2021 report on Medicare Payment Policy from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC). Leading causes of death The leading cause of death are heart disease, cancer, and respiratory disease. Note that these figures are from 2018. MedPAC notes that the 3rd leading cause of death in 2020…
Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and US Census Bureau, Woolf et al. (2021) find: Between March 1, 2020, and January 2, 2021, the US experienced 2 801 439 deaths, 22.9% more than expected, representing 522 368 excess deaths…The excess death rate was higher among non-Hispanic Black (208.4 deaths per 100 000) than non-Hispanic White…
That is the finding from a study published by Anne Case and Angus Deaton this week in Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). While COVID-19 has had a clear impact in the last 12 months, in fact figures from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) indicate that American life expectancy peaked in…
On the eve of Martin Luther King Day, let us take a quick look at the impact of COVID-19 by race/ethnicity. CDC reports rates of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. One can see that cases are higher for most minorities (except Asians) relative to Non-Hispanic Whites, but hospitalizations and deaths are much higher for all…
Last year, I published a paper that showed that cancer mortality rates fell by 24% between 2000 and 2016 and further that new cancer drugs accounted for saving 1.3 million lives in the US over that time period. At the end of the paper, we noted that these numbers may be conservative since the use…