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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Time to death and health expenditure
— an improved model for the impact of demographic change on health care costs | | Author(s) | Meena Seshamani, Alastair Gray |
| Journal title | Age and Ageing, vol 33, no 6, November 2004 |
| Pages | pp 556-560 |
| Source | http://www.ageing.oupjournals.org |
| Keywords | Hospital services ; Costs [care] ; Demography ; Death rate [statistics] ; Longitudinal surveys. |
| Annotation | Morbidity and health care costs may be concentrated towards the end of life, and therefore the costs of ageing may actually reflect the costs of impending death. The authors used a longitudinal hospital dataset which followed 90,929 patients aged 65+ from 1970 to death, to create an economic model of hospital costs based on patient age and time remaining to death. They then applied the model to population projections for England to predict the effect of demographic changes on hospital expenditures in England from 2002 to 2026. The decline in age-specific mortality rates over time postpones death to later ages, pushing back death-related costs. Accounting for this in expenditure projections gives a predicted annual growth rate of 0.4% - half of the rate predicted with a traditional method. The study confirms that the pressure of population increases and ageing demographic structure on hospital expenditures will be partially countered by the postponement of death-related hospital costs in later life. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-041216214 A |
| Classmark | LD: QDC: S8: S5: 3J |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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