Healthcare expenditures growth: the red herring of demographic ageing?

Hausse des dépenses de santé. Quel rôle joue le vieillissement démographique ?

Marianne Tenand

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Abstract: Demographic ageing is often deemed responsible for the massive increase in health expenditures experienced by developed countries. As the elderly consume more medical care than the rest of the population, how could the increase in the share of the 60 + not lead to a marked expansion of healthcare public and private budgets? Despite its apparent logics, such reasoning is fallacious: it ignores that medical care consumption depends on many factors beyond age, which have tremendously evolved in the last decades and may change again in the future. Based on French stylized facts, this article provides an overview of the international literature that aimed at disentangling the respective roles of population ageing and of the non-demographic factors in explaining the dynamics of health expenditures. Paradoxically, technical medical progress has been a major contributor to the increase of healthcare spending. Results from economics research lead to qualify the impact of demographic trends and call for more attention to the public policies decisions that shape healthcare systems.

Keywords: Ageing population; Health Care Expenditure; Vieillissement démographique; Dépenses de santé (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-hea
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Published in Médecine/Sciences, 2016, 36 (2), pp.204-210. ⟨10.1051/medsci/20163202015⟩

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Working Paper: Healthcare expenditures growth: the red herring of demographic ageing? (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01289489

DOI: 10.1051/medsci/20163202015

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