Heroin has a new face. According to statistics from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, it’s a white male in his 30s and 40s. Surprisingly, heroin use has grown in recent years, sounding alarms among community leaders, public health officials and law enforcement. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) National…
read moreAccording to estimates from the World Health Organization, 8.3 million people worldwide died from cancer and other neoplasms in 2008—about 14% of all deaths. In the same year, the overall costs of cancer care in the United States amounted to $228.1 billion– $93.2 billion direct medical costs, $18.8 billion in indirect morbidity costs, and $116.1…
read moreThe Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program is an incentive-based repayment plan linked to the quality of care hospitals provide to Medicare patients. With VBP, hospitals are held accountable for both the quality and cost of their services, and must reach specified performance measures to be rewarded. CMS continues to…
read moreIn recent years there has been renewed attention devoted to coordination of medical care services across the continuum of care, particularly in the area of prevention, monitoring, diagnostics, and disease management. This is not entirely new to the U.S. In the early 1990s, as managed care began to widen its reach and increase market share,…
read moreAccording to the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association (NHCAA) and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, the estimated annual costs of health care fraud in the U.S. are more than $70 billion, or about 3% of total national health care expenditures. This is an amount large enough to wipe out the savings from many…
read moreDuring the health reform discussions leading up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), there was a lot of talk about the costs of health care services in the U.S. Some argued that the legislation did not go far enough in controlling the underlying upward trends in health care costs, while others argued…
read moreWomen make about 80% of the health-care decisions for their families, utilize more health care than men, and are the more likely to be the care givers when a family member becomes sick. Females of all ages accounted for 60% of all expenses incurred at doctors’ offices in 2004. According to the Bureau of Labor…
read moreDuring the recent debates over the Affordable Care Act (“ACA,” or Obamacare) a commonly raised issue was that U.S. health care does not offer much in the way of “value for money.” The argument, generally, is that we spend a lot more in the U.S. relative to comparable countries but in turn receive poor quality…
read moreTobacco product litter is one of the most ubiquitous forms of litter, accumulating in increasingly large numbers on streets, highways, sidewalks, beaches, storm water drains, waste treatment plants, parks and other public places. Tobacco product litter (“TPL”) is not simply unattractive; it has been shown to be toxic and costly to clean up. More than…
read moreThe health care landscape in the U.S. has been changing rapidly in the past 20 years, a phase of evolution that began with the reluctance of private employers to continue to fund double-digit growth in employee health care costs, thereby creating incentives for third-party payers to develop “managed” insurance products. The next phase of those…
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