Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
From a Mark et al. (2026) paper published in Health Affairs last week: …from 2000 through 2021, mental health and SUD nominal spending grew from $40.9 billion to $139.6 billion. Mental health and SUD accounted for 4.5 percent of all medical services spending in 2000 and 5.5 percent in 2021. Real per capita mental health and SUD spending grew…
How do mental health issues impact the likelihood of food security? This question is difficult to answer empirically for (at a minimum) two primary reasons: Endogeneity/Unobserved factors. For instance, personal, family, and neighborhood characteristics (e.g., family stability, access to health care, exposure to violence) may impact both mental health and the likelihood of food insecurity.…
That is the key takeaway from a recent JAMA Viewpoint by Carlo, Barnett and Frank (2020). While there has been some progress, there are still tremendous gaps that need to be addressed. For patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other more serious mental health conditions, less than two-thirds received care for their illness, according to…
At the American Psychiatric Association meeting last week, the APAM Center provided some suggestions. AJMC reports that their 5 policy recommendations include: Create action plan to insure network adequacy. “Employers can start by expanding services at the inpatient and outpatient levels, and engaging regional and national organizations to add providers, including specialty providers. They can…
Access to physician services and pharmaceuticals is vital–particularly among patients with serious mental illness–to insure patients receive the care they need. However, the likelihood patients receive this care depends on where they live. A paper by Manchester (2018) examines a cohort of patients eligible for both Medicare and U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and…
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…
This is the topic of a recent publication with co-authors Kata Bognar, Katie Everson, Michelle Brauer, Darius Lakdawalla and Felicia Forma. The full title is Does knowledge of patient non-compliance change prescribing behavior in the real world? A claims-based analysis of patients with serious mental illness. The abstract is below, but do read the whole thing…
That is the conclusion from Dean et al. (2018) published in JAMA Psychiatry. Using a Danish registry of individuals born between 1965 and 1998, the measure the likelihood a crime event (any or violet) between 2001 and 2013. They find that: In a total cohort of 2 058 063 (48.7% male; 51.3% female), the adjusted IRRs…
This is the title of a talk by Jürgen Unützer, Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. Although you can find an article with a video of the talk and the corresponding article at NEJM catalyst, one interesting section of the talk is pasted below: “How…
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…