Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity In the Elderly U.S. Population

David Cutler, Kaushik Ghosh and Mary Beth Landrum

No 19268, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The question of whether morbidity is being compressed into the period just before death has been at the center of health debates in the United States for some time. Compression of morbidity would lead to longer life but less rapid medical spending increases than if life extension were accompanied by expanding morbidity. Using nearly 20 years of data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, we examine how health is changing by time period until death. We show that functional measures of health are improving, and more so the farther away from death the person is surveyed. Disease rates are relatively constant at all times until death. On net, there is strong evidence for compression of morbidity based on measured disability, but less clear evidence based on disease-free survival.

JEL-codes: I1 J11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hea and nep-ltv
Note: AG EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published as Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity in the Elderly U.S. Population , David M. Cutler, Kaushik Ghosh, Mary Beth Landrum. in Discoveries in the Economics of Aging , Wise. 2014

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19268.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity in the Elderly U.S. Population (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:19268

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w19268

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().