Dr. Buttery's Public Health Blog - Details

Each year since 1990, the nonprofit United Health Foundation, created by insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, has compared states on a variety of health measures to determine whether the nation's health is getting better or worse. This year, the report rated states on 23 measures, including immunization rates, obesity, premature death, and violent crime. For the fourth consecutive year, the health of the nation as a whole declined. The analysts attributed the decline to "rising obesity rates, more people without health insurance, and the persistence of unhealthy behavior such as tobacco use.”

That is one of the findings of a study forthcoming in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Science. The researchers analyzed the responses of 516 men and women age 70 and older who participated in the Berlin Aging Study, tracking how their perceptions about age and their satisfaction with aging changed over a six-year period. "Women saw themselves as about four years older than their male peers," the Senior Researcher said. "There are several likely reasons for this gender gap in subjective physical age. One is that women may be more aware of their appearance than men, especially given the negative stereotypes of older bodies."

The costs that health care providers are charged and reimbursed for childhood vaccines vary widely, and the high cost of some immunizations is leading to significant financial strain for some physicians, according to a pair of new studies from the University of Michigan Health System. The studies found that the price-per-dose of one brand of hepatitis B vaccine, for example, ranged from $4.26 to $13.06 at different medical practices. Reimbursements of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine ranged from $16.77 to $59.02. Many physicians in the survey expressed dissatisfaction with the price and reimbursement levels of vaccines. While few physicians in the survey indicated that they had considered no longer providing all vaccines to privately insured children (11 percent overall; 5 percent of pediatricians and 21 percent of family physicians), about half of them reported that they had delayed the purchase of some vaccines for financial reasons and experienced a decline in profit margins from immunizations.