One Pill Makes You Larger

Yesterday the National Center for Health Statistics released the 2010 edition of Health, United States. This annual report is mostly a compilation of survey results available elsewhere on the NCHS web site, but its 148 trend tables offer an historical perspective that can be insightful. In table 138, for example, you can see at a glance that the percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds without health insurance climbed from 16 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in 2009--the biggest increase among age groups.

Table 94, Prescription Drug Use in the Past Month, is my favorite. This table shows that 48 percent of Americans took at least one prescription drug in the past month, up from 38 percent roughly two decades ago. Twenty-one percent took three or more prescription drugs in the past month, up from 12 percent. Among people aged 65 or older, 65 percent have taken three or more prescription drugs in the past month, up from 35 percent in the earlier time period.