Heart failure accounts for 37% of Medicare expenditures

Medicare beneficiaries with heart failure have many more doctorvisits and take more medications than those without heart failure,researchers are reporting.

They based their conclusion on an analysis of data on 173,000Medicare beneficiaries. The overall average age of the beneficiarieswas 70.7 years, while the average age for those with heart failure wasbetween 76 and 77 years.

The analysis found that:

Patients with severe heart failure saw an average of 23 differentMedicare providers a year, compared with about 7.9 providers fortypical Medicare beneficiaries.Those with mild heart failure saw anaverage of 15.9 providers a year, and those with moderate heart failuresaw an average of 18.6 providers a year.Patients with all stages ofheart failure received an average of 61 prescriptions annually,compared with 29 for a typical beneficiary.About 26 percent of officevisits for heart failure were to internal medicine specialists andabout 20 percent were to family practice physicians. Visits tocardiologists for those with mild, moderate and severe heart failureincreased as heart failure worsened and were 16 percent, 18 percent,and 20 percent, respectively.About 46 percent of severe heart failurepatients had diabetes, 46 percent had chronic obstructive pulmonarydisease (COPD) or other respiratory diseases, and about 32 percent hadkidney disease.In 2005, beneficiaries with heart failure accounted for37 percent of all Medicare spending and almost 50 percent of allhospital inpatient costs. Typical inpatient costs for a severe heartfailure patient were about $24,000 a year, compared to about $3,000 fora typical beneficiary. 

Source:  Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/12/AR2008111201456.html