The high variability in hospital costs for the elderly Medicare beneficiaries has been cited as evidence of hospitals’ inefficient resource use. Nonetheless, an accurate analysis on hospital efficiency must take account of both health outcomes and resource usage.
Prisoners suffering from mental illness or showing its symptoms are common among criminal justice populations. The potential relationship between crime and mental illness could have important policy implications, particularly if increased more widespread mental health treatment could prove to have wide effects on rates of criminality.
Hearing loss in the United States has been shown to be on the rise — a 2008 survey found that 35 million Americans suffer from the partial or complete loss of the ability to hear. While some of this is due to the aging of the baby boomer generation, hearing loss among younger Americans has also increased.
The benefits associated with being physically active include higher levels of fitness and lower risks of developing a number of chronic diseases. In terms of weight management, however, most people who lose weight from increased physical activity are not able to sustain the loss over time.
Efforts to create healthy workplaces generally focus on safety. Programs that support employees’ choosing healthier behaviors — being more physically active or adopting a better diet, for example — are less common.
Medical authorities have long suggested that exercise is an essential part of leading a healthy life. Regular physical activity has been shown to not only improve fitness for those of all ages, but also reduce the incidence of many diseases.
For decades, women with early diagnoses of breast cancer have been encouraged to have the lymph nodes beneath their arm pits surgically removed. Draining the lymph nodes often precedes the surgery, which is then followed by radiation treatment. While painful and fraught with potential complications, removal of the lymph nodes has been standard practice in the medical community.
State and federal taxation of alcoholic beverages has long been a charged issue among voters. Claims of overly paternalistic policy on one side are met with arguments that alcohol taxes are a deterrent to antisocial behavior.
As of 2009, 33.4 million people worldwide were living with HIV, with some 2.7 million new infections each year, according to the World Health Organization. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that more than one million people in the United States alone are HIV positive, and that one in five of those individuals is unaware of his or her infection. Given the scope of the problem, slowing the spread of HIV remains a public policy issue of enormous importance.
Type 2 diabetes remains one of the fastest-growing conditions in the United States. A number of studies have found connections between moderate alcohol consumption and reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes, compared with abstention or excessive consumption. However, most of these studies only measured alcohol consumption at one point in time and then assumed relatively stable consumption rates.
