Americans shelled out $320 billion on medicines in 2011, according to a report issued by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. That's up 3.7 percent from $307 billion in 2010. The report cites newly available generic treatments for many chronic conditions as a factor in keeping the spending increase minimal. However, while the past decade saw the most medicines launched in a 10-year period brought new treatment options to more than 20 million Americans, patients visited their physicians and used prescription drugs less often, the report states.
There is a general consensus that U.S. healthcare needs major reform. Can reverse innovation—innovations originating from poor countries—provide one important answer? Most definitely. In the U.S., the approach is to spend more money on major technological advances and come up with innovative products and solutions. In poor countries, the innovation paradigm is just the opposite: spend less and innovate new business models. Poor countries face severe resource constraints. They just cannot afford to spend a lot. Constraints need not be limiting, they can actually be liberating. By comparison, there is something highly inefficient about the health care delivery in the U.S.—and much to learn from poor countries.
Shortages of prescription drugs nearly tripled from 2005 to 2010 and reached record levels in 2011 as manufacturers ceased operations or ran into production problems. In some cases, lifesaving treatments have been delayed, sending patients on desperate searches for needed medicines, doctors say. Shortages have also caused injuries from mistakes and at least 15 deaths around the country since mid-2011, according to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. Shortfalls are so common that pharmacy staffers at hospitals are spending many extra hours to ensure an uninterrupted flow of medicine to cancer patients, victims of heart attacks and accidents, and a host of other ill people.
The mayor announced a deal for California Pacific Medical Center construction, the largest private hospital construction project in San Francisco history, with great fanfare. The big winners are the landlords and speculators. The centerpiece of this goes to one of the biggest issues in this crowded city: Jobs and housing costs. The mayor talks about jobs all the time—he's the "jobs mayor, jobs jobs jobs." Which is popular when unemployment remains stubbornly high. But there's a flip side: If you create a lot of jobs that attract new residents to the city, and you don't build housing that's affordable to those workers, you put additional pressure on the existing housing stock, driving up costs for everyone.
Screening longtime tobacco users for lung cancer would be less costly than the widely accepted practice of screening for breast, cervical and colorectal cancers and would reduce the death toll of lung cancer by an estimated 15,000 lives a year, according to a study released Monday that is likely to ignite debate on expanding healthcare coverage for smokers. A group of actuarial economists calculated that annual low-dose CT scans of middle-aged Americans who have smoked the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes every day for 30 years would cost each insured American an extra 76 cents a month. That investment could give each person whose lung cancer was caught early an extra year of life, at a cost of $18,862 per patient.
The son of a Brooklyn baker, Dr. David M. Eisenberg, an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, is the founder and chief officiant of "Healthy Kitchens/Healthy Lives," an "'interfaith marriage," as he calls it, among physicians, public health researchers and distinguished chefs that seeks to tear down the firewall between "healthy" and "crave-able" cuisine. Although physicians are on the front lines of the nation's diabetes and obesity crises, many graduate from medical school with little knowledge of nutrition, let alone cooking. It is a deficiency that is becoming increasingly apparent as the grim statistics climb.