Basically utilization doesn’t drive cost increases. Branding is and provider market leverage.
That intuitively makes sense when you think about something like prostrate cancers and the all the ads for proton treatment at named place xyz. Regular therapy is expensive at $18k average. Proton runs $38k average.
Care to guess were the demand is?
Diabetes is expensive too, average $80k lifetime charges for someone in their 50s when diagnosed. Add in the percentage of population with diabetes from ’97 to 2013 went from 2.5% to 7.5% and we have a formula for disaster.[/quote]Uh, yeah. The demand is with the boomers but I believe that Gen Y and even children are starting to become susceptible to diabetes. I can’t believe how big a lot of the middle-schoolers are around me!
Cancer treatment in pill form is now about $5-10K month, infusions are $20K and up per month. The newer biologic and “targeted therapies” could run as high as $40-70K month. Unfortunately, chemo does not even work in so many cases and instead shortens the life of the patient and destroys the quality of what little life they have left.
The above expense doesn’t even take into account the cost of surgery before chemo, which could run $20 – $100K. OR the cost of the cancer coming back after a period of remission.
Cancer is probably the most expensive disease because many forms of it are so virulent, hard to eradicate and stubbornly return after a remission.
Prostate cancer is slow-growing so the patient has more time to plan how they want to be treated or in most cases, watch it and wait to be treated for it at a later date.
I’ll look at the report from CO that you provided. CO has thin air which can cause enlargement of the heart in sucseptible longtime inhabitants, especially those who live at the higher elevations.
