mortality rates

With the future of the Affordable Care Act still up in the air, most of the news coverage has gone to insurance coverage, premiums and Medicaid. And rightly so. But also included in the massive health reform law were a number of innovative measures to improve the quality and value of the medical care we actually get in the doctor’s office. With repeal still on the table, those measures are at risk too. One of those ACA efforts is the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, which reduces Medicare payments to hospitals with relatively high rates of often-preventable hospital readmissions. The…

by Laura Punnett, ScD Perhaps you’ve heard that there are some unusual trends in U.S. death rates – specifically, that white people are experiencing an unexpected increase in mortality. Last year, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published an innovative analysis calling attention to the alarming increase in mortality rates, specifically in white, non-Hispanic, middle-aged Americans. This trend contrasts dramatically with previous historical declines among whites, the continuing declines in U.S. Blacks and Latinos, and the declines in many other developed countries.  The report has…

By Sara Gorman In the late 1940s and 1950s, it became increasingly evident that mortality rates were falling rapidly worldwide, including in the developing world. In a 1965 analysis, economics professor George J. Stolnitz surmised that survival in the “underdeveloped world” was on the rise in part due to a decline in “economic misery” in these regions. But in 1975, Samuel Preston published a paper that changed the course of thought on the relationship between mortality and economic development. In the Population Studies article “The changing relation between mortality and level of economic…