Read on and you will find that you are going to need some sort of medical procedure as you get older.
In fact, about 12 individual per 1,000 Medicare beneficiaries will need a joint replaced. I will repeat that again in just a moment.
Keep rolling those dice ladies (and gents). It ain’t gonna’ matter that much.
I will remove a bit more of the surprise – for Medicare enrollees, joint replacements (knees and hips) were found to account for almost 450,000 inpatient admissions.
Of course your reaction to this is…
As a small consolation, I included a few “Lucky’ songs at the bottom of this post.
Joint Replacements Medicare’s No. 1 Hospital Expense
NBC reports that in 2013, joint replacement was Medicare’s most common covered hospital procedure. Among thousands of details uncovered from 2013 Medicare billing data (Department of Health and Human Services), joint replacements were found to account for almost 450,000 inpatient admissions and $6.6 billion in payments.
Yeah, that just is for Medicare.
Surprisingly, Other Joints Don’t Perform Nearly As Well
The only other legal joint activities that attempt to rival these medical procedures was the $700 million in Colorado legal joint sales (2014).
Just like Montana and Rice, Sherlock and Watson, Laurel and Hardy, dogs and cats, Guns and Roses, Penn and Teller, Hall and Oates, you have knees and hips as a famous pair. Nationally, these major joint-replacement procedures averaged about 12 per 1,000 Medicare beneficiaries. In some areas of the country, the rate was nearly twice as high or even greater. HHS data reveals joint replacement surgery rates are highest in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states.
| Procedure | Total procedures performed 2010 | % of procedures |
| Arteriography and angiocardiography using contrast material | 2,000,000 | 3.70% |
| Cardiac catheterizations | 1,000,000 | 1.85% |
| Endoscopy of small intestine with or without biopsy | 1,000,000 | 1.85% |
| Endoscopy of large intestine with or without biopsy | 499,000 | 0.92% |
| Diagnostic ultrasound | 1,000,000 | 1.85% |
| Balloon angioplasty of coronary artery or coronary atherectomy | 500,000 | 0.92% |
| Hysterectomy | 498,000 | 0.92% |
| Cesarean section | 1,300,000 | 2.40% |
| Reduction of fracture | 671,000 | 1.24% |
| Insertion of coronary artery stent | 454,000 | 0.84% |
| Coronary artery bypass graft | 395,000 | 0.73% |
| Total knee replacement | 719,000 | 1.33% |
| Total hip replacement | 332,000 | 0.61% |
| Total number of procedures performed | 54,100,000 | |
| US Population 2010 | 309,300,000 |
You can find more medical procedure data here.
As promised, here is your “Lucky” for you music.
And for you football fans, your are in “Luck.”