Tag: "life expectancy"

The Cost Effectiveness of New Drugs

Between 1996 and 2003, the mean vintage of prescription drugs increased by 6.6 years. This is estimated to have increased life expectancy of elderly Americans by 0.41-0.47 years. This suggests that not less than two-thirds of the 0.6-year increase in the life expectancy of elderly Americans during 1996-2003 was due to the increase in drug vintage. The 1996-2003 increase in drug vintage is also estimated to have increased annual drug expenditure per elderly American by $207, and annual total medical expenditure per elderly American by $218. This implies that the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (cost per life-year gained) of pharmaceutical innovation was about $12,900.

NBER working Paper by Frank R. Lichtenberg.

Dec 13, 2012 | 9 comments | by

Stopping Smoking Doesn’t Reduce Health Care Spending

But the increased spending is offset by productivity gains:

[W]e estimated that cessation accompanied by weight gain would increase average life expectancy by 3.7 years, and that the average lifetime reduction in medical expenditures from improved health ($5,600) would be offset by additional expenditures resulting from prolonged life ($7,300)…

Avoidance of weight gain after quitting smoking would increase average life expectancy by four additional months and reduce mean extra spending resulting from prolonged life by $700. Overall, the average net lifetime health care cost…would be…more than offset by even one year’s worth of productivity gains.

Health Affairs study. Aaron Carroll comments.

Dec 11, 2012 | 9 comments | by

Socialism Kills

In a recent Health Alert I evaluated Paul Krugman’s claim that ObamaCare is going to save “tens of thousands of lives” and the repeal of ObamaCare will lead to the death of “tens of thousands” of uninsured people.

Krugman’s bottom line: Mitt Romney wants to let people die. The economics profession on this same subject: Krugman’s claims are hogwash.

But there is something that does cause people to die: socialism. More precisely, the suppression of free markets (the kinds of interventions Krugman routinely apologizes for) lowers life expectancy and does so substantially.

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Nov 07, 2012 | 34 comments | by

Health Costs During Retirement

From an annual report from Fidelity Investments:

For a 65-year-old couple retiring this year, the cost of health care in retirement will be $240,000, 6 percent more than that same couple retiring in 2011 would pay. The report assumes that the man will live 17 years and the woman 20…The $240,000 number captures the Part B premium for physician services, Part D for prescription drugs.

Another study, this one from Nationwide Financial, found that people who were near retirement routinely and wildly overestimated the percentage of health care costs covered by Medicare. It covers only 51 percent of health care services, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

More from Paul Sullivan on retirement planning in the NYT.

Oct 12, 2012 | 10 comments | by

Less Smoking vs. More Obesity: Is It a Wash?

We find that both changes in smoking and in obesity are expected to have large effects on mortality. For males, the reductions in smoking have larger effects than the rise in obesity throughout the projection period. By 2040, male life expectancy at age 40 is expected to have gained 0.92 years from the combined effects. Among women, however, the two sets of effects largely offset one another throughout the projection period, with a small gain of 0.26 years expected by 2040.

Source: NBER paper.

Sep 27, 2012 | 7 comments | by

Where Life Expectancy is Declining

For generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.

Source:New York Times.

Sep 24, 2012 | 12 comments | by

Inequality of Health

[T]he gap between the health of those who have college degrees and those who don’t has been growing dramatically. In particular, in recent years it has become apparent that those with college degrees tend to live a long time and then have only a short period of bad health in the period right before death — a pattern significantly less common for those without college degrees. Here is one of his academic papers backing up that claim.

Miles Kimball (Supply-Side Liberal).

Sep 07, 2012 | 14 comments | by

It’s Better To Be Old in America

Despite a Think Progress report that uses a data bait and switch in order to make good news look bad, Think Progress reports on about a big reduction in deaths from heart disease and stroke in the U.S. and the resulting increase in life expectancy of Americans over 65:

 According to a government report about the well-being of older Americans, today’s 65-year-olds can expect to live longer — to age 85, compared to 79 in 1980 — and healthier than previous generations. Deaths from heart disease and stroke have dropped almost 50 percent, which has helped to increase the average life expectancy for Americans.

And then strives to make the good news look bad:

…a dozen developed nations had longer life expectancies than America’s. Even though the U.S. and Japan had about equal life expectancies 30 years ago, Japanese citizens live about four years longer — to 89 — on average than Americans.

What Think Progress doesn’t mention is that demographic studies suggest that the shorter U.S. life-expectancy probably results from higher mortality in those under age 65. Higher mortality under age 65 is affected by many factors, including accident rates, homicide rates among the inner city poor, data artifacts like those that produce the spuriously high U.S. infant mortality rankings, differences in deleterious personal behaviors like smoking, overweight, or alcoholism, and the quality and availability of medical care.

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Aug 31, 2012 | 5 comments | by

Just How Progressive Are Elderly Entitlements?

Not as progressive as you might think. This is from Health Affairs via Sarah Kliff:

We know that education has a big impact on earnings and the ability to find employment. It also turns out to have a huge influence on how long Americans live: White men with less than a high school diploma had a life expectancy 12.9 years shorter than those with 16 or more years of education, according to new research in the journal Health Affairs. For women, the life expectancy gap stands at 10.4 years.

The Social Security payout formula is progressive. But less educated workers can expect to receive more than a decade’s worth of fewer benefits. Ditto for Medicare. See our previous post here.

Aug 13, 2012 | 8 comments | by

Are We Underestimating Future Life Expectancy?

The International Monetary Fund  asks what would happen if life expectancy by 2050 turns out to be three years longer than current projected in government and private retirement plans:

[I]f individuals live three years longer than expected–in line with underestimations in the past–the already large costs of aging could increase by another 50 percent, representing an additional cost of 50 percent of 2010 GDP in advanced economies and 25 percent of 2010 GDP in emerging economies. … [F]or private pension plans in the United States, such an increase in longevity could add 9 percent to their pension liabilities. Because the stock of pension liabilities is large, corporate pension sponsors would need to make many multiples of typical annual pension contributions to match these extra liabilities.

HT: Timothy Taylor in the Conversable Economist blog.

Apr 19, 2012 | 4 comments | by
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