[extropy-chat] Reasons for longer life.

Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu
Sun Sep 25 12:51:51 UTC 2005


At 07:06 AM 9/25/2005, BillK wrote:
>In the other thread Robin Hanson makes the claim that 15% of US income
>is spent on medical treatments and, of that 15%, 5% is useless and 10%
>of debatable value.
>But he also agrees that in developed countries life expectancy has
>been increasing steadily for the last 100 years. But he claims that
>nobody knows why. ...
>One method of finding out why some countries have greater life
>expectancy than others is to look at the differences between these
>countries. Obviously some differences will have little or no effect on
>life expectancy, but others will.
>This has been attempted by the World Health Organization.
>To summarize, they end up stating the obvious, namely, that if you
>live in poverty, have little food or clean water, have little access
>to medicines or health care, have little health education, possibly
>live in a polluted or dangerous environment, - then you are not going
>to live as long.  For [Healthy Life Expectancy] by country, see: ...
>Many diseases that still kill millions worldwide have been virtually
>eliminated from developed countries. ...
>So, to sum up, Robin could well be correct to say that most of the US
>medical expenditure today is just for a 'feel-good' factor. But a lot
>of life-extending facilities are taken for granted and done for little
>expense. e.g. vaccinations, clean water, disinfectant, hygiene,
>aspirin, antibiotics, etc. You can see what happens in countries where
>these cheap 'taken-for-granted' items are not available.

No, you can see that poor countries tend to have worse health.  But many
things vary between poor and rich countries, so it takes some work to
figure out which of those things we should attribute the health differences
to.  There is a large literature on this subject.  The best analyses use
multiple regressions to try to disentangle the influences.  Most of those
studies find no effect of medical spending on health.  For example, see:

<http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/research/workpapers.nsf/View+to+Link+WebPages/9A18DABAD113598D852567E00055E694?OpenDocument>Child 
Mortality and Public Spending on Health: How Much Does Money Matter?




Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323 





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