Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Cancer is a horrible disease. Providing high quality care often means providing safe, effective and cost-effective treatments that meets a patient’s priority. Reaching these goals, however, is particularly challenging when treating older adults with cancer. A paper on this exact topic by Ramsdale et al. (2017) notes that: Cancer care delivery for older adults with…
In the U.S., the answer is largely the government. An NBER paper by Mariacristina De Nardi, Eric French, John Bailey Jones, and Jeremy McCauley provide some helpful statistics using data from 1996 to 2010 waves of the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS). The government pays for two-thirds of health care spending by the elderly, with Medicare…
As the baby boomers age, the responsibility for the care of many of these individuals will fall to their children. For the elderly who have trouble running errands, dressing themselves, or even bathing themselves, having a family member as a caregiver can significantly improve the elderly’s quality of life. Many of these caregivers get burnt…
My grandmother is 96 years old and incredibly lives on her own. My mother drops off packages of food she prepares for my grandmother and gets her mail, but my grandmother still does her laundry and gets herself ready in the morning. Bringing in some help for her or moving her to an assisted living…
How do we measure the financial burden of elderly obesity? At first this seems like an easy question to answer. Find the average medical spending of the obese elderly and compare that to the spending of an elderly individual of healthy weight. Yet causation is difficult to show. True, it is possible that the obese…
In 2006, the federal government first began expanding Medicare coverage to include prescription drugs using the Medicare Part D program. According to one report, Part D will cost taxpayers $47 billion in 2007. Yet it is possible that Medicare Part D could actually save taxpayers money. If prescription drugs and other medical care are substitutes,…