Continuing from last night's post - I have scoured through more data sources, including the CDC and the AHRQ - including Vital Statistic Reports, Weekly Mortality and Morbidity Reports and the MEPS or Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys and Briefs.
Here are the points that I wish to make:
Cause of Death VS Cause of Cost
- The leading causes of death are not always the top in medical expenditures. The top five causes of death are heart disease, cancer, stroke or cerebrovascular disease, chronic lower respiratory disease (which I learned DOES include asthma), and unintentional injury or accidents. Heart disease or heart conditions and cancer have remained the top two causes of death and expenditures over the decade. Together they account for about 49% of annual deaths and over 180 billion dollars. The five diseases that cost the most to treat include those two, and trauma related disorders which I am going to say are accidents, mental disorders and asthma. WOW. This is true for the past ten years and the costs to treat went up across the board.
Most Shocking Info
The information on mental illness, even knowing what I know about over-medication and misdiagnosis was still confounding to me. The largest increase in expenditure over the ten years (1996-2006) was for treatment of accidents and mental illness. I bet this has a lot to do with more treatment options for the accident victims and more diagnosis and medications for the mentally ill. According to the MEPS Statistical Brief #248, the number of people included in the category for mental health expenditures went from over 19 m to over 36 m in ten years.
Some interesting Points
According to the listed documents, cancer patients have the lowest out of pocket expenses, while the mentally ill have the highest. The highest amount for inpatient care was spent on heart disease and the highest emergency room fees were in the trauma category. Again, the one that shocked me the most and shouldn't have was the cost of prescription drugs for the mentally ill - the HIGHEST out of over 50 referenced conditions - 26,143.75 million dollars on drugs. The second highest drug category was for hyperlipidemia - cholesterol and triglycerides at 22,148.17 - it is all about the marketing of prescription drugs! Heart disease patients have a lot more ER visits than cancer patients. I find it interesting that asthma and COPD are more costly to treat than diabetes. Diabetes is sixth.
Most Curious Data
I think I was thinking of the asthma. I am surprised that it costs so much to treat and I checked to see where it fell on the causes of death list. I am still digesting that people die from asthma, but I believe the lungs become damaged from inflammation and scaring over time. Anyways, according to some sources and the CDC Vital Statistics document, asthma is included in the Chronic Lower Respiratory Disease CLRD category which is the 4th leading cause of death. There were over 124,000 deaths attributed to CLRD in 2006 and just under 4000 are related to asthma. The costs for treating asthma are the lowest in regards to the five stated above but the medication expenditures are second highest of the five.
Most Brow Furrowing Statistic
I work in public health and one of the issues we explore and target is disparities among genders and races. In this blog I have made note of higher incidence in many disease conditions in the black population. So I was surprised that in the leading causes of death, more white people die each year than black. This includes heart disease and cancer where as the difference in stroke death is .3 percent - and yet blacks have higher rates of hypertension. However there are some causes of death that are high for blacks, such as homicide and diabetes than are not as high for whites. Over all, many more black people die each year than white, per 100,000 persons the death rate is 982 black and 764 white. That has everything to do with access to prevention and treatment.
Well I have done it again - hours writing a blog when I should be reading a novel - I hope you found this as interesting as I did!
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