Medicare outcomes have improved markedly over past two decades, study indicates

Over the past two decades mortality and admissions to hospital have fallen markedly among Medicare patients, while health outcomes have improved, a new study has reported.1 The study appears in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which features articles marking Medicare’s 50th anniversary.

In an audio summary accompanying the paper, the lead author, Harlan M Krumholz, of Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, said that the report “suggests we are in the midst of a remarkable improvement in health and healthcare.”

“The improvements we observed were extraordinarily broad based,” Krumholz added. “We looked at various different subgroups: we looked by age, we looked by sex, …