Obese people incur higher health care costs at a given point in time, but how rising obesity rates affect spending growth over time is unknown. We estimate obesity-attributable health care spending increases between 1987 and 2001. Increases in the proportion of and spending on obese people relative to people of normal weight account for 27 percent of the rise in inflation-adjusted per capita spending between 1987 and 2001; spending for diabetes, 38 percent; spending for hyperlipidemia, 22 percent; and spending for heart disease, 41 percent. Increases in obesity prevalence alone account for 12 percent of the growth in health spending.
Differences in education, income, and Internet access did not account for the disparities in PHR registration by race. In the short-term, attempts to improve patient access to health care with PHRs may not ameliorate prevailing disparities between African Americans and whites.
Prevention, including routine cancer screening, is key to meeting national goals for the elimination of death and suffering due to cancer. Since 1991, the U.S. government has invested in programs such as the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (NBCCEDP) to detect breast and cervical cancer early among uninsured low-income women. A concomitant goal is reducing racial disparities in screening and early detection, and the NBCCEDP program targets lowincome women who are more often racial and ethnic minorities. This paper analyzes data to test for effects of the NBCCEDP and other determinants of screening across racial/ethnic groups. We used data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) for 1996 through 2000. These data indicate that gaps in testing for breast and cervical cancers between African American and non-Hispanic white women aged 40-64 years have closed but remain for Hispanics. Multivariate findings indicate that the longevity of free screening sites through the NBCCEDP significantly increased both tests for non-Hispanic white women. The data do not confirm this effect for other racial and ethnic groups. Analysis did indicate that public insurance, or Medicaid, was equal to private insurance in promoting increased testing for African Americans and Hispanics, but not for non-Hispanic whites. Assuring that Medicaid remains available for women in this nonelderly group and increasing access to free screening sites can lead us closer to national screening goals, yet policies still need to address racial/ethnic disparities in insurance and service delivery. Cancer 2007;109(2 Suppl):348-58.
We calculate the level and growth in health care spending attributable to the fifteen most expensive medical conditions in 1987 and 2000. Growth in spending by medical condition is decomposed into changes attributable to rising cost per treated case, treated prevalence, and population growth. We find that a small number of conditions account for most of the growth in health care spending--the top five medical conditions accounted for 31 percent. For four of the conditions, a rise in treated prevalence, rather than rising treatment costs per case or population growth, accounted for most of the spending growth.
Antibiotic-resistant infections are a global health care concern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 23,000 Americans with these infections die each year. Rising infection rates add to the costs of health care and compromise the quality of medical and surgical procedures provided. Little is known about the national health care costs attributable to treating the infections. Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, we estimated the incremental health care costs of treating a resistant infection as well as the total national costs of treating such infections. To our knowledge, this is the first national estimate of the costs for treating the infections. We found that antibiotic resistance added $1,383 to the cost of treating a patient with a bacterial infection. Using our estimate of the number of such infections in 2014, this amounts to a national cost of $2.2 billion annually. The need for innovative new infection prevention programs, antibiotics, and vaccines to prevent and treat antibiotic-resistant infections is an international priority.
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