Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
How will Medicaid expansions affect patient access to pharamceuticals? This question is particularly relevant for patients with serious mental illness. The answer is complicated by the increasing presence of Medicaid managed care plans. Increasingly, states have turned to contracts with Medicaid managed care plans in order to better control costs and reduce budgetary uncertainty. However, in…
A recent paper by Roehrig finds that annual U.S. spending to treat mental illness is $201 billion. This puts mental illness as the most expensive disease to treat. Previous estimates using data such as the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) did not have mental illness as the most expensive disease. However, MEPS examines health care…
Mental illness is a highly prevalent class of diseases with potentially debilitating affects. About 30% of Americans have a mental illness and almost half (46%) will have a mental illness at some time in their lives. Examples of mental illness include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety disorders. A paper by Glied and Frank (2016) summarizes the transformation…
Nature has an interesting article on how mobile technology is being used to treat mental illness. Estimates suggest that about 29% of people will experience a mental disorder in their lifetime1. Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) show that many of those people — up to 55% in developed countries and 85% in developing…
In this day and age, does having a mental illness still carry a stigma? According to research by Prashant Bharadwaj, Mallesh M. Pai, Agne Suziedelyte, the answer is yes. Comparing self-reports to administrative data records on diagnosis and prescription drug use, we find that survey respondents under-report mental health conditions 36% of the time when asked…
The most common drug class taken among patients aged 18-44 is an antidepressant. Furhter, these relatively young and healthy patients are likely to be the ones who enroll in healht plans within the health insurance exchanges. The question is, how easily can patients access information about antidepressant coverage? According to a recent RWJ report, the…
Dr Dana Goldman, a USC professor and partner at my employer–Precision Health Economics–explains how restrictive prior authorization policies can adversely affect the care patients with schizophrenia receive.
Patients with schizophrenia often require medication—such as antipsychotics—to control the symptoms of their disease. However, adherence to these medications has been poor. Valenstein et al. (2004) estimate that 40% of patients are non-compliant with therapy [i.e., mediation possession ratio (MPR)<0.8]. Why are schizophrenia patients likely to be non-complient to antipsychotic therapy? One key reason is…
How did the enactment of Medicare Part D affect the mental health of the elderly? This is the question Ayyagari and Shane attempt to answer in their recent JHE paper. The authors use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) between 2010 and 2010 to measure changes in depressive symptoms among patients aged 60-70.…
Following up a December 2014 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, testimony last week Linda T. Kohn, Director of Health Care at the GAO describes how fragmented the federal government provides very fragmented support services care for individuals with serious mental illness. Coordinate across agencies is lacking and few agencies have conducted evaluations of their programs. Agencies identified 112 federal programs…