Mental Disorders Top The List Of The Most Costly Conditions In The United States: $201 Billion.

Estimates of annual health spending for a comprehensive set of medical conditions are presented for the entire US population and with totals benchmarked to the National Health Expenditure Accounts. In 2013 mental disorders topped the list of most costly conditions, with spending at $201 billion.

Cancer care cost trends in the United States: 1998 to 2012.

Background: The authors examine trends in spending on cancer from 1998 through 2012, including cancer care costs, prevalence, and cases by payer, and discuss the results within the context of a prior analysis and recent health policy and programmatic changes.

Methods: Condition-specific distribution of expenditures from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, supplemented with results from the National Nursing Home Survey and other data sources, was used as the basis for allocating the Personal Health Care components of the National Health Expenditure Accounts among conditions.

Results: Cancer care expenditures grew at an annualized rate of 2.

A Framework for Assessing the Value of Investments in Nonclinical Prevention.

We present a high-level framework to show the process by which an investment in primary prevention produces value. We define primary prevention broadly to include investments in any of the determinants of health. Although it builds on previously developed frameworks, ours incorporates several additional features.

Prevalence trends for three common medical conditions: treated and untreated.

Studies that use the number of individuals treated for a medical condition to investigate its prevalence understate true prevalence and obscure prevalence trends. For example, treated diabetes prevalence was less than half of true prevalence in 1999-2000. Over the ensuing twelve years, the rate of increase in treated prevalence was more than 50 percent higher than that of true prevalence.

Tradeoffs in cardiovascular disease prevention, treatment, and research.

It is widely believed that the US health care system needs to transition from a culture of reactive treatment of disease to one of proactive prevention. As a tool for understanding the appropriate allocation of spending to prevention versus treatment (including research into improved prevention and treatment), a simple Markov model is used to represent the flow of individuals among states of health, where the transition rates are governed by the magnitude of appropriately-lagged expenditures in each of these categories. The model estimates the discounted cost and discounted effectiveness (measured in quality adjusted life years or QALYs) associated with a given spending mix, and it allows computing the marginal cost-effectiveness associated with additional spending in a category.

The growth in cost per case explains far more of US health spending increases than rising disease prevalence.

Some prior research has suggested that health spending for many diseases has been driven more by increases in so-called treated prevalence-the number of people receiving treatment for a given condition-than by increases in cost per case. Our study reached a different conclusion. We examined treated prevalence, clinical prevalence-the number of people with a given disease, treated or not-and cost per case across all medical conditions between 1996 and 2006.

National health spending by medical condition, 1996-2005.

This study responds to recent calls for information about how personal health expenditures from the National Health Expenditure Accounts are distributed across medical conditions. It provides annual estimates from 1996 through 2005 for thirty-two conditions mapped into thirteen all-inclusive diagnostic categories. Circulatory system spending was highest among the diagnostic categories, accounting for 17 percent of spending in 2005.

Quantifying national spending on wellness and prevention.

Purpose: We estimate national health expenditures on prevention using precise definitions, a transparent methodology, and a subdivision of the estimates into components to aid researchers in applying their own concepts of prevention activities.

Methodology/approach: We supplemented the National Health Expenditure Accounts (NHEA) with additional data to identify national spending on primary and secondary prevention for each year from 1996 to 2004 across eight spending categories.

Findings: We estimate that NHEA expenditures devoted to prevention grew from $83.