What Drives Health Care Spending? Can We Know Whether Population Aging Is A 'Red Herring'?

Henry Aaron

Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College from Center for Retirement Research

Abstract: Several empirical studies have presented evidence that per-person health care spending does not rise with calendar age but with proximity to death. Hence, it is alleged that increases in longevity will not, by themselves, boost health care spending. Unfortunately, available data provide no basis for assuming that the curve relating average health care spending to age will, or will not, flatten with increases in longevity. For this reason, budget projections based on the assumption that increases in longevity will not boost health care spending may understate projected growth of health care spending.

Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2009-10, Revised 2009-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://crr.bc.edu/working-papers/what-drives-healt ... ng-is-a-red-herring/ (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:crr:crrwps:wp2009-18

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College from Center for Retirement Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Grzybowski () and Christopher F Baum ().