Oregon is reinventing the Jeffrey Brenner techniques; maybe they should meet Dr. Brenner.
Can a blood test reveal your life expectancy?
Should Medicare pay for a $3,000 test that allows early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease?
This is Peter Orszag:
Our common perception is that retirement is a time when we can relax and take better care of ourselves after stressful careers. But what if work itself is beneficial to our health, as several recent studies suggest?
The evidence is mixed, but:
Examining the growing educational gradient in life expectancy from 1997 to 2006, Montez and Zajacova focused on white women ages 45 to 84. In addition to differential trends in smoking by education, they concluded that among these women “employment was, in and of itself, an important contributor.” The life expectancy of less-educated women was being shortened by their lower employment rates compared with those of highly educated women.
Health Care Expenditures in the Last Two Years of Life
As this graph shows, the total cost of nursing home care during a person’s last two years is extremely sensitive to that person’s longevity and rises steadily as that persons attained age increases. But the cost of that patient to Medicare during those final two years actually decreases. As the article concluded, “longevity after the age of 65 has a larger effect on the costs of nursing home care […] than on the costs of services covered by Medicare.” Thus, the increasing number of persons eligible for Medicare in the future will certainly increase that program’s costs, but their increasing longevity is itself a benign factor. Or as Harvard economist David Cutler concluded, “longer life in itself will not add to Medicare costs.”
Richard Kaplan at the Health Care Blog.
As early as the 1970s, researchers found that immigrants lived several years longer than American-born whites even though they tended to have less education and lower income, factors usually associated with worse health. That gap has grown since 1980…Evidence is mounting that the second generation does worse. Exploratory estimates based on data from 2007 to 2009…show that Hispanic immigrants live 2.9 years longer than American-born Hispanics.
[One study] found that immigrants had at least a 20 percent lower overall cancer mortality rate than their American-born counterparts.
Mortality rates from heart disease were about 16 percent lower, for kidney disease 18 percent lower, and for liver cirrhosis 24 percent lower.
This is from The NYT.
“The best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness — the qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person,” according to the two professors…
“It was not cheerfulness and it was not having a sociable personality that predicted long life across the many ensuing decades,” she and Friedman wrote in their book. “Certain other factors were also relevant, but the prudent, dependable children lived the longest. The strength of this finding was unexpected, but it proved to be a very important and enduring one.”
Book, book review, and article on the book. HT: Arnold Kling.
The haves are those who enjoy great health into their 90s. The have-nots are those who suffer from serious health problems and do not live to see adulthood. As we pointed out in a recent study, among those Americans who were born in 1975, the unluckiest 1 percent died in infancy, while the luckiest 1 percent can expect to live to age 105 or longer. Now let’s fast forward to those born in 2012. The bottom percentile of this cohort can expect to survive until age 18. At the other end of the spectrum, the luckiest 1 percent can expect to live to age 108. That’s a much bigger gain in life expectancy among the have-nots than among the haves. Of course, life expectancy is but one measure of health and well-being, but understanding these trends offers a more complete picture than considering income alone.
The American. HT: Tyler Cowen.
More on these issues in the Health Affairs blog.
