[extropy-chat] Reasons for longer life.

Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu
Sun Sep 25 17:43:28 UTC 2005


At 11:12 AM 9/25/2005, BillK wrote:
> > 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. ... Child
> > Mortality and Public Spending on Health: How Much Does Money Matter?
>
>I think you are taking the wrong conclusion from this 1997 report.
>What it seems to show to me is that in poor undeveloped countries
>there is no point in giving them x million to spend on 'health'
>because they don't have the structures to get the services to all the
>population.

You can draw that conclusion if you like, but the data itself in that
paper just shows no correlation between health and public medical spending,
controlling for other things.


>Read these five chapters from the 2005 report.
><http://www.who.int/whr/2005/chapter2/en/index.html>
>"... exclusion from access to health care is commonplace in poor
>countries. ... failed to get the antibiotic they needed, and 70% of
>children with malaria failed to receive treatment . ... Their exclusion
>from care is also reflected in inferior health indicators."

Yes, poor people get less medicine.  That report just gives unsupported
editorial commentary, not data connecting less medicine to less health.



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 





More information about the extropy-chat mailing list