Healthcare costs rising

It is no longer sufficient to show that a drug is effective and well tolerated. With healthcare costs rising, it is necessary to provide economic measurements of the benefits that a new drug... 

Refer to Section 10.7. The industry consensus is that biogenerics will be a reality in the near future, resulting from improvements in technology, which would be able to provide more precise characterization of proteins, and the continued pressure to drive down rising healthcare costs. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers. 2002, April. The Factors Fueling Rising Healthcare Costs. PricewaterhouseCoopers Washington, DC. 

As healthcare costs continue to rise, governments are continually seeking to contain their healthcare expenditures. 

Many polls in the US confirm that the public widely believes rising drug prices are responsible for increasing healthcare costs. However, the reality is that increasing consumption ( utilization ) is a far more powerful driver of healthcare services, in general, and of drug spending, in particular (Fig. 1.4), as consumers visit doctors more frequently for more conditions and receive more expensive treatments for them. 

In the absence of clear clinical benefit, the cost of allografts and xenografts when compared to early generations of synthetics makes their selection in all but the most extreme cases difficult for the clinician. What these products have certainly done is create an opportunity for new synthetics to enter the market at a premium price. This will be an important field to watch in the coming years as long-term outcomes become known, and as efforts to control rising healthcare costs continue to drive the marketplace to safe, effective, and economical solutions in hernia repair. 

The following was found on an Internet chat room about the rising costs of healthcare. 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which estimated a prevalence in 2001 of 7.9% in adults. This is equivalent to 16.7 million people. Because at least 30% of all prevalent cases are undiagnosed, the total number may have been almost 22 million. Note that in 1987, the prevalence of diagnosed diabetes was 6.8 million. This large increase in diabetes has been observed globally. The prevalence of diabetes in adults worldwide was estimated to be 4.0% in 1995 and anticipated to rise to 5.4% by the year 2025. The prediction is that in 2025 there will be 300 million adults with diabetes, greater than 75% of whom will live in developing countries. These statistics have led to diabetes being described as one of the main threats to human health in the twenty-first century. The prevalence of diabetes mellitus increases with age, and approximately half of all cases occur in people older than 55 years. In the United States, -20% of the population older than 65 years have diabetes. There is racial predilection, and by the age of 65, 33%, 25%, and 17% of Hispanics, blacks, and whites, respectively, in the United States have diabetes mellitus. In 2002 diabetes mellitus was estimated to be responsible for 132 billion in healthcare expenditures in the United States. The direct costs were 92 billion, with 50% of that incurred by those older than 65 years. An estimated 186,000 deaths annually are attributable to diabetes. In fact, American women are twice as likely to die from diabetes mellitus as from breast cancer. Approximately one in five American healthcare dollars spent in 2002 was for people with diabetes mellitus. 

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