Impact of Hypertension on Health Care Cost Research Paper

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Hypertension II

Cost of Hypertension

The economics of health care depends on a progressive decision process that allocates scarce resources, in a manner that achieves the best overall outcomes (Alcocer & Cueto, 2008, p. 147-149). This process is necessarily complicated and imperfect, and the desired result can be influenced by a number of social and political forces, including geographic boundaries, racial and economic disparities, and competing funding needs. To provide the best health care possible for a given funding level, policy makers will need to increasingly rely on evidence-based approaches to help them grasp the cost-effectiveness of specific treatments.

This cost-effectiveness calculation is complicated by conditions or diseases that contribute to the morbidity and mortality of other conditions. For example, hypertension is often recognized as a direct-contributing factor to diabetes, ischemic heart disease, and cerebrovascular disease and aggressive hypertension treatment can't always be assumed to be cost-effective (Author, 2012). The actual costs realized from aggressively treating hypertension was found to vary in the Western countries studied, from actual cost savings to costing as much as $100,000 dollars per life-years gained (LYG) (Alcocer & Cueto, 2008, p. 153). The variable with the biggest impact on cost-effectiveness was disease risk, with those at high risk gaining the most from treatment.

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Such studies beg the question of how much should be spent per LYG? The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that the cost-effectiveness cutoff for health care interventions should be triple the country's per capita GDP (Alcocer & Cueto, 2008, p. 153). For the United States this would be U.S.$141,597 per LYG in 2011 (The World Bank, 2012). With a cutoff this high, it seems likely that additional advantages would be obtained by effectively treating the remaining 50% of the U.S. population that does not have its blood pressure under control (reviewed by Trogdon, Allaire, Egan, Lackland, & Masters, 2011).

The Higher the Risk, the Bigger the Benefit

A recent study in Greece examined the cost-effectiveness of treating adults based on their smoking status (Athanasakis, Souliotis, Tountas, Kyriopoulos & Hatzakis, 2011). A total of 1,453 patients completed follow up, of which 47% were male and the overall median age was 59.5 ±9.9 years. Treatment lowered systolic blood pressure an average of 32.0 and 34.7 mmHg for men and women, respectively. The gain in quality adjusted life years were 0.84 and 0.57 per patient for male smokers and nonsmokers, and 0.84 and 0.4 for.....

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