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Costs of Hepatitis C
- Source :
- Archives of Internal Medicine. 161:2231
- Publication Year :
- 2001
- Publisher :
- American Medical Association (AMA), 2001.
-
Abstract
- To estimate the direct and indirect costs of the hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the United States in 1997.Aggregation and analysis of national data sets collected by the National Center for Health Statistics, the Health Care Financing Administration, and other government bureaus and private firms. To estimate costs, we used the human capital method, which decomposes costs into direct categories, such as medical expenses, and indirect categories, such as lost earnings and lost home production. We consider HCV that results in chronic liver disease separate from HCV that results in primary liver cancer.We estimate $5.46 billion as the cost of HCV in 1997. Costs are split as follows: 33% for direct and 67% for indirect costs. Hepatitis C virus that results in chronic liver disease contributes roughly 92% of the costs, and HCV that results in primary liver cancer contributes the remaining 8%. The total estimate of $5.46 billion is conservative, because we ignore costs associated with pain and suffering and the value of care rendered by family members.To our knowledge, only one estimate of the annual costs of HCV in the 1990s has appeared in the literature, $0.6 billion. However, that estimate was not supported by an explanation of the methods. Our estimate, which relies on detailed methods, is nearly 10 times the original estimate. Our estimate of $5.46 billion is on a par with the cost of asthma ($5.8 billion [1994]).
- Subjects :
- Adult
Male
medicine.medical_specialty
Carcinoma, Hepatocellular
Cost-Benefit Analysis
Interferon alpha-2
Chronic liver disease
Human capital
Ribavirin
Internal Medicine
medicine
Humans
Production (economics)
Health statistics
Aged
Government
Actuarial science
Earnings
business.industry
Public health
Liver Neoplasms
Interferon-alpha
Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C, Chronic
Middle Aged
medicine.disease
Recombinant Proteins
United States
Liver Transplantation
Surgery
Survival Rate
Cross-Sectional Studies
Costs and Cost Analysis
Female
Health Expenditures
business
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 00039926
- Volume :
- 161
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Archives of Internal Medicine
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....3d9dfdf262fff66fbfbe47bea9828dd1