Health Care Spending Gone Wild: Using Expensive Insulin Analogs With Few Clinical Advantages
JAMA Clinical Reviews
English - June 23, 2018 14:00 - 27 minutes - 25.2 MB - ★★★★★ - 413 ratingsMedicine Health & Fitness Science medical clinicalpractice healthcare medicine Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Health care spending in the United States is out of control. The most significant aspect of medical care driving this spending is pharmaceuticals; within pharmaceuticals the greatest increases have been in spending for diabetes medications. The cost of insulin analogs has increased 5- to 6-fold in the last 10 years for no particular reason. More than 90% of US patients who use insulin use these analogs, despite the fact that they have few if any clinical benefits relative to regular or NPH insulin, which cost 1/10 as much. Aside from the cost of insulin, diabetes is probably treated far more aggressively than necessary since clinical trials demonstrating the benefits of aggressive glucose control for type 2 diabetes demonstrated vanishingly small benefits of this form of treatment. In this podcast we discuss the perplexing case of spending too much money on diabetes treatment.