THE FIGHT AGAINST HEART DISEASE—“EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE AND WILDLY SUCCESSFUL.”
THE FIGHT AGAINST HEART DISEASE—”EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE AND WILDLY SUCCESSFUL.” I argued here that it is wrong to talk about the increase in health care costs without taking into consideration the improvements that those higher costs are achieving. The quote in the caption is from a wonderful article in the Washington Post by David Brown that analyzes some of the improvements. Here are the numbers:
“In the 1960s, the chance of dying in the days immediately after a heart attack was 30 to 40 percent. In 1975, it was 27 percent. In 1984, it was 19 percent. In 1994, it was about 10 percent. Today, it’s about 6 percent.
Over the same period, the charges for treating a heart attack marched steadily upward, from about $5,700 in 1977 to $54,400 in 2007 (without adjusting for inflation).”
The death rate from heart disease is less than a third of what it was in 1970. About half of the decline in that death rate since 1980 is due to improvements in medical care and about half to a lower risk profile—”less smoking, lower cholesterol, better blood pressure.” I note that lower cholesterol and better blood pressure may partly be due to better drugs.