Interesting Data

JAMA has an exceptionally interesting piece on Health Care costs and changes. The authors state:

From 1996 through 2013, $30.1 trillion of personal health care spending was disaggregated by 155 conditions, age and sex group, and type of care. Among these 155 conditions, diabetes had the highest health care spending in 2013, with an estimated $101.4 billion (uncertainty interval [UI], $96.7 billion-$106.5 billion) in spending, including 57.6% (UI, 53.8%-62.1%) spent on pharmaceuticals and 23.5% (UI, 21.7%-25.7%) spent on ambulatory care. Ischemic heart disease accounted for the second-highest amount of health care spending in 2013, with estimated spending of $88.1 billion (UI, $82.7 billion-$92.9 billion), and low back and neck pain accounted for the third-highest amount, with estimated health care spending of $87.6 billion (UI, $67.5 billion-$94.1 billion). The conditions with the highest spending levels varied by age, sex, type of care, and year. Personal health care spending increased for 143 of the 155 conditions from 1996 through 2013. 

The following chart is quite interesting, albeit open for some discussion.

DUBE is Diabetes and a collection of other things. Frankly I would have liked to see T2 Diabetes separate but I suspect it and its sequellae are all over the chart. The greatest sum is in the 65 and older as one might suspect.

The above is interesting since it depicts annual costs total and per person by age and by disorder. Surprisingly older women are more costly than older men. Also as one would expect over 85 is costly. However I would expect that if one looked at the distribution it would be some 80:20 rule, namely 20% of these people account for 80% of the cost.

Finally the data below is of interest, which is a chart of Public Health spending.

The ones with the greatest change are of most interest. Such as breast cancer with an annualized cost increase of 30%! I really do not know what to make of this one. But worth reporting.