Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
Drugs known as “orphan” drugs are those used to treat rare disease. However, how “rare” is rare disease? In Europe, a rare disease is one affecting 5 or fewer people per 10,000 residents. In the U.S. this figure is less than one in every 1,500 residents. Although each rare disease is–by definition–rare, about 350 million…
Between 2017 and 2018, premiums Obamacare health insurance plans plans rose by 32%. To be more specific, the Urban Institute reports that: The national average increase was 32.0 percent for the lowest-priced silver plans and 19.1 percent for gold plans, but the increases varied by states…State changes in average lowest-priced silver premiums ranged from a 22.5…
That is the conclusion from a Bloomberg article highlighting some research done by some of my colleagues at Precision Health Economics in conjunction with the Alzheimer’s Association. An excerpt is below. The Alzheimer’s Association commissioned researchers at Precision Health Economics to study the potential savings of obtaining an earlier diagnosis. It used data from the Health…
A paper in JAMA by Papanicolas, Woskie and Jha (2018) try to answer the question. One reason could be that Americans are less healthy than people in other countries. On the one hand, Americans do have the highest rate of obesity in the world; on the other hand, smoking rates are among the lowest. Another…
According the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Office of the Actuary (OACT), in 2016 the U.S. spent $328.6 billion on prescription drugs, or 10% of all health care spending. We also see that prescription drug spending increased 1.3% to $328.6 billion in 2016, slower than the 8.9% growth in 2015. These trends towards more…