Live Longer Through Medicine

With health care expenses going up, one question is whether we are getting anything of value. The Wall Street Journal reports on a study which found that the increased health care spending is worth it:

Health-care spending may be soaring, but the increased outlays over the last 40 years are worth the price in terms of extended U.S. life expectancy, a new study argues.

That conclusion, reached by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Michigan, may surprise patients and employers alarmed by their health-care bills. Government figures show health-care outlays have risen at better than twice the inflation rate in recent years.

The university researchers attempted to tackle the question of whether the spending is worth it by looking at how much more Americans spend today on health care compared with past decades, and how that relates to the number of years of life gained.

Overall, the increases in spending over the last 40 years have provided “reasonably good value,” according to the University of Michigan’s Sandeep Vijan, one author of the study that appears in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.

With increased heatlh care expenses being found to be of value, ways will need to be found to make it affordable to those who currently cannot afford adequate insurance or medical care.

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