A handful of conditions such as mental illness, stroke, diabetes and lung disease accounted for much of the huge increase in health-care spending dating back to the late 1980s, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
The $200 billion increase in health-care spending from 1987 to 2000 was due partly to more sick people, but also to more expensive costs of care, Emory University economist Kenneth Thorpe and colleagues reported.
“We find that a small number of conditions account for most of the growth in health care spending -- the top five medical conditions accounted for 31 percent,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in this week’s issue of the journal Health Affairs and available on the Internet at www.healthaffairs.org.
“If we really want to get a handle on rising health care costs, we need to analyze what it is we’re spending money on, instead of where we’re spending the money,” Thorpe said in a statement.
Between 1987 and 2000, the 15 costliest medical conditions were heart disease, mental disorders, lung disease, cancer, trauma, high blood pressure, diabetes, back problems, arthritis, stroke and other brain blockages, skin disorders, pneumonia, infectious disease, hormone disorders, and kidney disease.
Those 15 conditions accounted for 56 percent of the overall growth in spending, Thorpe found.
Health-care spending rose to about $628 billion from $429 billion between 1987 and 2000.
For their study, Thorpe and colleagues used two U.S. government surveys -- the 1987 National Medical Expenditure Survey of 34,000 people and the 2000 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey of 25,000 people.
They found many more people were being treated for certain conditions and that those new patients accounted for 60 percent of the rise in spending on stroke and other brain blockages.
New patients accounted for 59 percent of the rise in spending on mental disorders, the report found.
While mental disorders did not become more common, twice as many people sought treatment for them between 1987 and 2000, Thorpe’s team found.
In part, better diagnosis was responsible, they said, but so was the availability of better drugs.
They found little change in the number of people treated for heart disease between 1987 and 2000. The big hikes in spending there were due to better but more expensive new drugs and devices.
The researchers cautioned their study was not definitive — patients reported their own data and the study did not cover people in institutions.