An end to progress?

Perhaps not, but there is some sobering news from the United Nation’s 2021/2022 Human Development Report that was released this week. BBC reports: Over the past two years, nine out of 10 countries have slid backwards on the UN’s Human Development Index. Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and the impact of climate change are blamed for…

Variation in State Health Care Expenditures

How have medical expenditures varied over time and across states? That is the question being asked by Johnson et al. (2022) in a recent Health Affairs paper. The authors use State Health Expenditure Accounts data between 1999-2014 and then extrapolate these trends forward with a regression-based approach to predict State spending through 2019. Using this…

COVID-19 news and stats

Some COVID-19 news updates. 66.5% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. 12.09 billion doses have been administered globally, 5.74 million COVID-19 vaccines are administered each day. Only 17.6% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. There have been approximately 550 million cases of COVID-19…

Overview of FDA Drugs Approved in 2021

In 2021, the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) approved 50 new drugs, either as new molecular entities (NMEs) under New Drug Applications (NDAs), or as new therapeutic biologics under Biologics License Applications (BLAs). FDA summarizes these approvals in their recently released report titled: Advancing Health Through Innovation: New Drug…

Nurse employment and wage trends

Recent news articles have spilled much ink about the current nurse shortage. According to Pew, due to nursing shortages “Hospitals nationwide are canceling nonemergency surgeries, struggling to quickly find beds for patients and failing to meet the minimum nurse-patient ratios experts recommend.” Nursing wages are rising as well. The Baltimore Sun reports that the University…