Historical Health care charts illustrate XMRV outbreak??

Hmm. Well, I tend to think that two of the earliest comments on this blog posting in the NY Times (from July 2009) are good explanations for the upswing in the trajectory: deregulation of the insurance (and health care) industries and the advent of very expensive medical technologies. MRI, for instance, an extremely expensive imaging modality, emerged in the mid 1980s. I have a hard time conceiving of how an outbreak of disease that receives little attention or treatment could drive up expenditure on medical care significantly. The aggressive efforts to treat cancer, the practice of no-holds-barred end-of-life medical treatment in ICUs, and the AIDs epidemic probably did contribute quite a bit as well. Where the cost of CFS would show up in the GDP, I imagine, if anyone looked for it, would be in lost "manpower" in the workforce.

Interesting graph. The cost of ME/CFS would include "Million Dollar Workups" (testing for and excluding all other conditions, a time consuming--sometimes years, costly and potentially harmful practice), "Wastebasket" diagnoses, and no treatments or a cure. It would be nice to know if there were a large number of new ME/CFS cases in the 1980's and if so why.

Not logical.

1. The charts show a sharp US/rest of world divergence, but the disease is not specific to the USA. If it is caused by a human reservoir pathogen (as opposed to, say, Ebola) there is no reason to believe that the virus knows which country it resides in.

2. It's quite a stretch to hang a large part of health pathology on one elusive virus. This is a dart game; pick a phenomenon with a chart, then throw something with an unclear date and rate of emergence at it. Since no one knows when, how quickly or even if XMRV spread in the US general population, it can be assigned to any chart that shows an uptick that works with whatever point one wants to make.
e.g: A nanobots invasion began in the mid '70s and the bots become more prevalent every few years. CFS seems to have begun in the late '70s and has become more prevalent every few years. There's no clear data as to when and how quickly nanobots emerged, but they're here now*, so my estimate of nanobot infection in the '70s is as good as anyone's. It so happens that my chart for the annual extent of nanobots matches the annual prevalence of CFS/ME. Therefore CFS is really caused by nanobots deposited by space aliens hiding in the tail of Haley's Comet. We must take immediate action.

* there are nanoparticles in things like paint and sunscreen but the MSM won't spill about the tiny robots. Think about it: you can never get Bluetooth to work, but everything these days has it. Why is it there? To control the nanobots. Prove me wrong!

;-)

I know it is far from the typical well written analysis from folks that mingle here.

I was simply trying to illusrate the correlation between health care spending and the huge increases in all these relatively "new diseases". The new diseases happen to spike around the 1980's when HIV is discovered(1981), CFS outbreaks in incline village and lyndonville(1984-1985), lyme disease (1982) and when I got sick (1984-1985).

I hope society (mainly governments) might admit someday the rises in health care spending are simply not related to increases in technology or some other cause. But if fact, the increases are from sicker people struggling to find answers since the 1980's.....

Health insurance premiums are skyrocking at a pace way above inflation like 10-20% year over year from what I have heard. Often times technology gets less expensive as it becomes more of a commodity, so I doubt that it can all be explained away with new techonolgies (that new technology argument is probably more of a political talking point in my opinion without seeing how costs have changed for an MRI machine in 30 years)