Closer Look
How Medicare reimbursement policies might shape doctors' specialty choices
Money may influence how doctors choose a particular specialty, a recent paper suggests, reflecting how the health care system values procedures over prevention. The U.S. will see a shortfall of 52,000 family doctors next year, sending more patients to emergency or specialty care. A working paper from the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics says the average physician salary is $405,000 a year, but primary care physicians make about half that while the top 1% hits $1.3 million. And top medical students gravitate toward higher earning potential.
The source of this compensation differential is Medicare, the authors contend, and its higher reimbursement rates (mirrored by private insurers) for procedures. "I can think about a patient's very complex medical issues for half an hour, and that can get paid less than a procedure that might take 10 minutes," said Heather Paladine of the New York State Academy of Family Physicians. STAT's Annalisa Merelli has more.
Aging
100 older adults died from falls every day in 2021
Of all the ailments of aging, falls may not seem dramatic, but they're actually the leading cause of injury and death in people over 65. A new CDC report determined that on average, 100 older adults died every day from falls in 2021. Over the previous 20 years, age-adjusted death rates have increased each year. There were some differences:
- Non-fatal falls were higher among women than among men, but fall-related death rates were higher among men than among women.
- In 2020, 19.9% of older adults in Illinois said they fell in the previous year, but 38.0% said the same in Alaska.
- In 2021, the unintentional fall-related death rate among older adults ranged from 30.7 per 100,000 people in Alabama to 176.5 in Wisconsin.
"Falls are not an inevitable part of aging," the researchers write. "Older adult falls can be prevented by addressing modifiable risk factors through effective preventive strategies."
cancer
A new approach to spotting cancer in a blood test taps DNA's cousin
Biotech companies are racing to develop liquid biopsies, tests that detect signs of cancer from a person's blood. Most of these firms take the same tack, studying free-floating bits of DNA released by tumors and searching for telltale mutations and chemical modifications that give away a cancer's existence and its location. But a new study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering shows that researchers can do the same with RNA, DNA's older and often-overlooked cousin, STAT's Jonathan Wosen tells us.
Even though just 1% to 2% of DNA codes for proteins, 75% of it is transcribed into RNA. Researchers found that broadly studying RNA in a person's blood helped them detect cancers of the liver, colon, and stomach, among others. Daniel Kim, the study's senior author, told STAT that RNA may be easier to detect from early-stage tumors than DNA, in part because it is released while cells are still alive and sent out in small, blubbery spheres that protect the molecules.
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