George, who is 51 years old, has been a police officer in Chester County for 31 years. He has lived a life of action — which comes with some feelings of invincibility. “As a police officer, there are times we think we are indestructible,” he explains.
Because of his active lifestyle — and no signs of heart problems whatsoever — heart disease was the furthest thing from George’s mind. “I walked anywhere from 6 to 8 hours a day. I was never winded, never tired, and I had no numbness. All of those telltale signs of heart disease — I never got any of them,” George explains.
Through a collaboration between Chester County Hospital and local police departments, George was offered a free cardiac risk screening for first responders. Despite zero signs of heart disease, he figured he might as well take advantage. Little did he know, he would end up having open-heart surgery just a few months later.
Publication Date: 10 Feb 2020
Publication Site: Chester County Hospital, Penn Medicine blog
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, in early 2020, Globe Life has been one of the life insurers that’s been quickest to give analysts candid assessments of U.S. mortality.
Mortality is much lower than it was when pandemic-related mortality was peaking, and mortality trends are now helping, not, hurting, Globe Life’s earnings, Kalmbach said.
“Mortality has been fairly consistent over the last few quarters, which has been good,” he said.
He sees the mortality rate from accidents and other nonmedical causes improving.
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“Heart disease and cancer, although improved, are still a little bit higher,” he said. “Another one that remains elevated as a cause of death is neurological disorders, which would be stroke and Alzheimer’s. We’re keeping an eye on that.”
For decades, runaway Medicare spending was the story of the federal budget.
Now, flat Medicare spending might be a bigger one.
Something strange has been happening in this giant federal program. Instead of growing and growing, as it always had before, spending per Medicare beneficiary has nearly leveled off over more than a decade.
The trend can be a little hard to see because, as baby boomers have aged, the number of people using Medicare has grown. But it has had enormous consequences for federal spending. Budget news often sounds apocalyptic, but the Medicare trend has been unexpectedly good for federal spending, saving taxpayers a huge amount relative to projections.
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Some of the reductions are easy to explain. Congress changed Medicare policy. The biggest such shift came with the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which reduced Medicare‘s payments to hospitals and to health insurers that offered private Medicare Advantage plans. Congress also cut Medicare payments as part of a budget deal in 2011.
But most of the savings can’t be attributed to any obvious policy shift. In a recent letter to the Senate Budget Committee, economists at the Congressional Budget Office described the huge reductions in its Medicare forecasts between 2010 and 2020. Most of those reductions came from a category the budget office calls “technical adjustments,” which it uses to describe changes to public health and the practice of medicine itself.
Older Americans appear to be having fewer heart attacks and strokes, the likely result of effective cholesterol and blood pressure medicines that became cheap and widely used in recent years, according to research from Professor Cutler and colleagues. And drug makers and surgeons haven’t developed as many new blockbuster treatments recently — there has been no new Prozac or angioplasty to drive up spending. (Medicare is currently barred by statute from covering the new class of expensive anti-obesity drugs.)
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Medicare may even wind up saving money because of Covid-19 — because the older Americans who died from the disease tended to have other illnesses that would have been expensive to treat if they had survived, according to an analysis from the Medicare actuary.
“I don’t know how much we can really blame COVID, or how much of this is that we’re just recognizing more of it,” Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, director of the Barbra Streisand Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, told “Good Morning America” on Monday. “But, heart disease is the leading killer of women and all ages, including teenagers, midlife women and older women. This is just a component of that major killer. So, it’s really something that needs to be addressed.”
Merz said one in five of those who suffer from the heart-brain disorder will have another attack within a decade.
In an October news release, Cedars-Sinai shared Smidt Heart Institute research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, which suggests that middle-aged and older women are being diagnosed up to 10 times more often than younger women or men of any age.
The study suggested that the condition has become more common, with incidences rising since well before coronavirus swept the globe.
The long-term trend has been improvement for this cause of death, with it most obvious for the oldest age groups. This trend has been driven by improvement in medical treatment for the condition, but also due to the decrease in smoking rates… decades ago. Some causes of death have behavior that precedes the death by decades, which can get tricky to track for our top two causes of death: heart disease and cancer. Even so, smoking cigarettes has been a huge driver for both these causes, and made a large differentiator by sex and smoking status for a long time.
