Today’s lead story in the NYT is here. The data supporting the assertion are here. The key is the share of GDP trend. For my money, I’m need to be further convinced it’s neither noise nor the Great Recession, but if this does bear out, then it’s hugely important to the country.
Category: public health
Health Reform Will Continue…
No matter how the Supreme Court rules on Obamacare…the opinion of fellow Amherst College classmate Ezekiel Emanuel here.
Sure Zeke, but as you point out, the key problem is the uninsured population: not only do they represent a public health disaster, as importantly they represent a huge economic drag on the US economy.
A novel argument for increasing the NIH budget
Can be found on ScienceInsider.
Money quote:
In this week’s online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Duke University demographer Kenneth Manton and colleagues compared death rates from 1950 to 2004 for four big killers—heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes—with the rising budgets of their corresponding NIH institutes. For all but diabetes deaths, which have risen recently because of rising rates of obesity, they found an inverse correlation between budgets and age-adjusted death rates 10 years later. And when they plotted the total NIH budget versus overall mortality rates (see graph), they found an “excellent” regression fit.
Discoverers and Discoveries 