Hearts, lungs, cancer and COVID-19 tend to get most of the attention, but kidneys play a big role in determining how well your clients will be doing toward the end of their lives, and what will happen to U.S. health care spending.
One of the most frightening effects of COVID-19 is that it may cause permanent damage to the patients' kidneys.
One of the biggest health policy fights already occurring in Washington is over efforts by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to make Medicare Advantage plan issuers open up to patients with "end-stage renal disease."
The traditional Medicare program has been covering dialysis for most people with end-stage kidney disease, at a cost of about $90,000 per patient per year.
More articles in this Health Data Atlas collection:
- Where More Prospects Are Binge Drinking
- Where More Prospects Are Getting Coronary Heart Disease
- Where More Prospects Have Diabetes
- Where More Prospects Are Having Lung Problems
- Where More Prospects Are Becoming Obese
Managers of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey program collect information about the participants' kidney problems.
One challenge for financial professionals who are mining the BRFSS data is that you may have a lot more interest than the CDC does in data for adults with annual household income over $50,000.
We sliced the survey data to map out how the percentage of high earners with kidney disease changed, at the state level, between 2013 and 2018.
