Pharmaceuticals are the fastest growing segment of health care costs. The costs are overwhelmingly marketing with much smaller shares for development / approval and heaven forbid post-approval testing.
My mother for instance spends a lot of time watching network television, a vast wasteland of ads for calcium retention aids, erectile dysfunction, overacitve bladder and restless legs control not to mention all the psychoactives, different things for cholesterol, heart disease, cancer-related anemias. Lots of studies indicate that drugs are WAY over prescribed for seniors and poor coordination of care often results in many interactions that worsen health and quality of life in multiple ways.
Seniors tend to be on more meds than younger cohorts. This dynamic was in effect long before the existence of the Medicare prescription drug plan and might be part of the dynamic generating the plan in the first place. More efficient way for Big Pharma to feed at the public trough for instance.
If I were going to go look for some comparative international data on how other countries manage to live longer on less money, I would look at different things other health systems do to keep Big Pharma at bay.
DoreneC
On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 10:50 AM, M <myles.sussman at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It would be interesting to see the consumption numbers per person, at constant age bracket (say, 35-ish). That way you could factor out the effect of changing the population pyramid. More older people in the population means more health care spending. But older people also have more savings/home ownership (which as we know from Greenspan can be used as a "bank") -- so they also might be consuming more "stuff" compared to their younger fellow citizens. I don't have a good guess what the answer would be.
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> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
>> Sent: Mon, October 5, 2009 1:49:49 PM
>> Subject: [lbo-talk] overconsuming health
>>
>> Just posted to the LBO website - how the boom in U.S. consumption is mostly
>> about medical inflation:
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>> http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Consumption.html
>> ___________________________________
>> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
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