A June 2009 study by Columbia University economist Frank Lichtenberg says "no." As Reason magazine's Ronald Bailey reports:
[A]dvanced medical technologies are not contributing all that much toward rising U.S. health care expenditures. Lichtenberg begins by looking at how the rate of increase in longevity has varied among U.S. states between 1991 and 2004. He investigates how such factors as the quality of medical care, behavioral risks (obesity, smoking, and AIDS incidence), and education, income, and health insurance coverage affect life expectancy. To measure differences in the quality of medical care, Lichtenberg examines how quickly each state took up advanced medical diagnostics and new drugs. He also calculates what fraction of physicians in a state were trained at top-ranked medical schools.Bailey concludes, "if Lichtenberg is right, slowing technological progress in medicine wouldn't save money, but it definitely would kill more people." See also Peter Suderman in the Wall Street Journal.
Lichtenberg's key finding is that life expectancy increased faster in states that more rapidly adopted advanced diagnostic imaging techniques, newer drugs, and attracted an increasing proportion of doctors from top medical schools. . .
Interestingly, Lichtenberg found that "growth in life expectancy was uncorrelated across states with health insurance coverage and education, and inversely correlated with per capita income growth." The last finding is a bit puzzling. Lichtenberg calculates that the average 20 percent increase in real per capita income resulted in lowering average life expectancy by 0.34-0.42 years and finds that states with high income growth had smaller longevity increases. . .
"The absence of a correlation across states between medical innovation and expenditure growth is inconsistent with the view that advances in medical technology have contributed to rising overall US health care spending," he concludes. Lichtenberg further speculates that states that have more quickly adopted high-tech procedures have not seen their health care expenses increase because "while newer diagnostic procedures and drugs are more expensive than their older counterparts, they may reduce the need for costly additional medical treatment." In other words, high-tech medicine may initially cost more, but it reduces spending in the long run, while increasing the life expectancies of patients.
Given America's superior health care outcomes, remind me why we should mimic the European model?
(via TigerHawk)
2 comments:
> The last finding is a bit puzzling. Lichtenberg calculates that the average 20 percent increase in real per capita income resulted in lowering average life expectancy by 0.34-0.42 years and finds that states with high income growth had smaller longevity increases. . .
Not so much. You don't have a lot of extra money, you sit at home doing whatever you were doing before. Watching TV, reading, playing with your Wii, surfing the web.
You have more money, you go out and do things with it -- skiing, hang gliding, getting killed at pottery class in a kiln explosion... just going out into the Real World and driving around from place to place is largely less safe, more risky, than sitting at home.
And no, don't give me any kind of hoary BS about how supposedly "more accidents occur in the home" -- both fatal and otherwise. If you divided those "at-home" accident numbers into the number of minutes spent at home, vs. "elsewhere" accidents against the number of minutes spent elsewhere, the per-minute of life risk would, I will wager, be much lower -- probably by an order of magnitude.
If your home was actually an inherently unsafe place to be compared to other places, you likely would not live there.
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