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To be actionable, I felt it more useful to look at healthcare costs by specific clinical condition, rather than by the general disease groupings of my last post. Here is the graphic I came up with (excluding mental disease categories for now).
The 8 red dots represent clinical condition codes with annual expenditures each in excess of $20 Billion. The green dots represent 14 clinical condition codes with costs in excess of $10 Billion (but less than $20B).
There has been a lot written recently about how some diseases cost the healthcare system more than others, and the fact that some patients (the sick ones and the old ones) cost more than others. I wanted to learn more about which clinical conditions are the big contributors to our national healthcare bill. So, for the purposes of this post I pretended I was an accountant, responsible for thinking about where to save money in the USA’s health budget. Here is what I learned.
My interest in this topic is part of my quest to identify new opportunities that I believe will arise as a result of turmoil and reshaping of the healthcare landscape over the coming decade (more on this topic here). It’s not that I think there is anything especially surprising or worrying about the fact that healthcare expenditures flow more to some diseases and patients than to others. To me that seems only to be expected. However, I do believe there is going to be increasing pressure to reduce costs, and that the logical places to look for new opportunity are where lots of money is presently being spent. [Read more…]
