Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
In the news, deaths from overdoses of opioids, heroin and fentanyl have been in the spotlight. Rightly so. Opioid deaths in the U.S have risen to almost 50,000 people in 2017, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. However, deaths from methamphetamines is on the rise as well. In fact, many individuals who die…
A number of medical studies have touted the benefits of medical marijuana. But who actually uses medical cannibis? Some statistics from Boenhke et al. (2019) provide the answer: While conventional wisdom hold that medical marijuana is frequently used for glaucoma, in practice, this medical marijuana is much more likely to be used to treat other…
The repeal of the individual mandate may have begun to appear in the uninsurance statistics. According to figures from Gallup, insurance rates rose to 13.7%, up from a recent low of 10.9% in Q3 2016.
Siegel et al. (2019) present a review of cancer incidence and mortality statistics in American over recent decades. Their key findings were: Over the past decade of data, the cancer incidence rate (2006‐2015) was stable in women and declined by approximately 2% per year in men, whereas the cancer death rate (2007‐2016) declined annually by…
According to a recent study in Health Affairs by Hernandez et al. (2019), the answer is ‘no’. The authors use pricing data from First Databank and pharmacy claims from UPMC Health Plan between 2008-2016 to track trends in drug prices over time. They found that the costs of oral brand name drugs increased 9.2% per year…
Continuing my series highlighting key trends from 2018, I summarize a post from Aviva Rutkin of The Conversation identifying key demographic trends in 2018. These include: Decreased U.S. life expectancy. For the third year in a row, life expectancy fell in the U.S. The reason for the increase? Increased mortality rates among working age adults due to…
That finding is according to an article [Martin et al. 2018] by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Office of the Actuary’s (OACT). Total nominal US health care spending increased 3.9 percent to $3.5 trillion in 2017, slowing from growth of 4.8 percent in 2016..Slower growth in health care spending in 2017 was mainly attributable to…
Pharmafile has an interesting article on the “Economics of Mental Health”. The article has a number of interesting statistics: The cost: “Mental health issues have been estimated to cost the world economy $2.5 trillion each year. To put that into perspective, the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product (GDP) was $2.6 trillion in 2017.” Costs extend…
In general, one expects progress. One expects that medical advances will improve life expectancy. In recent years in the U.S., however, that is no longer the case. The CDC reports that: …life expectancy at birth decreased in recent years for the first time since 1993. Between 2014 and 2015, life expectancy at birth decreased 0.2…
Federal funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) ended in September 2017. This caused a stir as many parent’s relied on CHIP for their children’s health insurance. In January 2018, however, the federal government’s passed a six-year CHIP funding extension and resolved to continue to fund this program. The headlines at the time showed pictures of…