Newer Drugs are Keeping People Alive
I investigate the contribution of pharmaceutical innovation to recent longevity growth in Germany and France… The estimates imply that almost half of the 1.7-year increase in German life expectancy during the period 2000-2007 was due to the replacement of older drugs by newer drugs… The estimates imply that chemotherapy innovation accounted for at least one-sixth of the decline in French cancer mortality rates, and may have accounted for as much as half of the decline.
Paper by Frank R. Lichtenberg (gated, but with abstract) here.
What’s the cost of that 1.7 years of life? And what is the quality of life?
Frank Lichtenberg does some great work on the impact of new drugs on mortality and longevity.
Well, that certainly doesn’t help with our entitlement problem.
Many kinds of cancer are now managed as a chronic disease thanks to new drugs. And a lot of new drugs cost more but make up for that by reducing other kinds of care–one of Lichtenberg’s other papers suggests that new drugs reduce overall expenditures by roughly 30 percent.
This pisses me off. I get mad when drugs crtaeed and tested at publicly funded universities get sold to big pharma and they charge outrageous amounts of money when they didn’t put the investment in R D.