Buy Me Some Peanuts and Cracker Jack But Please Watch Your Utilization Rates
Baseball is life, T-shirts inform us. Not because the game is something to be cherished and celebrated — though true fans are enthralled — but because every time you think you have it figured out, you learn that you don’t. (Maybe the shirts should say, “Baseball is love.”)
For years, I’ve felt that all health services could be fully covered, with much to spare, if our technological growth had stopped in the 1970s. Of course, many of us would be dead for lack of the advances in treatment that have come our way in recent decades. Then I looked at other industries. For instance, technological advances seem to cut the cost of computers and phones.
Or do they? If you manufacture something that costs a dollar a unit to create, what would you have to charge if 10,000 people wanted it? If it costs $5 to make, what could you charge 10 million people and still make a handsome profit?
Our cover story looks at lab costs. Contributing editor Joseph Burns reports that utilization spurs an increase in spending as much as the cost of the tests. Economics has as much to do with psychology as with statistics. One health plan says that the cost per test has stayed about the same, but that test utilization is driving spending up by 8% to 10% annually, twice that of overall medical costs, which have been rising 4% to 5% annually.
In Medicare, clinical lab tests rose by an average of 5.6% annually from 2003 through 2012, including a sharp increase in spending of 9.1% in 2012.
No matter what happens in a baseball game, even if that event is something longtime fans have never seen before, as the crowd files out of the stadium, what really matters is what’s on the scoreboard.
Maybe managed care is life, too.
Our other journal
P&T Journal for October 2014
FEATURES
The Clinical Trial Model Is Up for Review
Pyrazinamide-Induced Hyperuricemia
Lung Cancer Research Is Taking On New Challenges
Medical Applications for 3D Printing: Current and Projected Uses
PIPELINE PLUS
Steady Progress on Parkinson’s Disease
DEPARTMENTS
MEDICATION ERRORS
Telling True Stories Is an ISMP Hallmark
PRESCRIPTION: WASHINGTON
FDA Accepts Its First Biosimilar Application
New Drugs/Drug News/New Medical Devices
Pharmaceutical Approval Update
DRUG FORECAST
Edoxaban: an Investigational Factor Xa Inhibitor

Paul Lendner ist ein praktizierender Experte im Bereich Gesundheit, Medizin und Fitness. Er schreibt bereits seit über 5 Jahren für das Managed Care Mag. Mit seinen Artikeln, die einen einzigartigen Expertenstatus nachweisen, liefert er unseren Lesern nicht nur Mehrwert, sondern auch Hilfestellung bei ihren Problemen.