Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
You may think you know single payer systems, but do you really? Last week, the NHS celebrated 70 years of existence. The Guardian has an interactive article that you can use to guess how health care in England has changed over the past 70 years. I encourage you to read the article and test your…
Clearly the answer will vary by individual, family and country. Overall, however, the answer is no. In fact, things are getting much better if we look back over the last 100 or 200 years. This is the argument of economist Max Roser: As Dr. Roser concludes, despite dramatic gains over he last 200 years, there is…
A number of studies have suggested that we are spending too much on end of life care. Consider this Kwok et al. (2011) study published in Lancet. Many elderly people in the USA undergo surgery in the year before their death. The rate at which they undergo surgery varies substantially with age and region and…