http://hanson.gmu.edu/showcare.pdfTDPerk wrote:That is so immediately and obviously wrong, it is not even laughable. People, a very great many people, now survive and continue to lead happy productive lives when they have suffered trauma and disease which would have killed them quickly in previous centuries; Hanson's is simply not a remotely credible hypothesis.Actually, Dr. Robin Hanson's work has proven that other than immunization and principles of sepsis and public sanitation, no other health care technology has done anything to extend the average life expectancy.
"The most definitive data on this topic comes from the RAND Health Insurance Experiment,
which for three to five years in the mid 1970s randomly assigned two thousand
non-elderly US families to either free health care or to plans with a substantial copayment.
Those with free care consumed on average about 25-30% more health care, as measured by
spending. They went to the doctor and hospital more often, and as a result suffered one
more restricted activity day per year, when they could not do their normal activities. The
extra hospital visits were rated by physican reviewers to be just as medically appropriate,
and to treat just as severe a stage of disease, as the other hospital visits.
Those with free care obtained more eyeglasses, and had more teeth filled. Beyond this,
however, there was no significant difference in a general health index, which was the designed
outcome measure. There was also no significant difference in physical functioning, physiologic
measures, health practices, satisfaction, or the appropriateness of therapy. Blood pressure
may have been reduced, but the point estimate was that this produced a 1% reduction in
average future mortality rates, which translates to roughly seven weeks of life [13, 65, 76].
And this estimate was not significantly different from no effect."
"For example, large medicallyunexplained
variations in Medicare spending across hospital regions [100, 101] were recently
used to estimate the regional mortality benefit from spending $1000 more in the last six
months of life. The benefit is bounded (at the 95% c.l.) to be less than 0.1% in general, and
less than 1% for a subpopulation with certain specific conditions (such as heart attack) [89]."
"The above studies are mostly about the marginal value of the last one third of spending.
What about the average value of the first two thirds of spending? Both life expectancy and
medical spending have increased in the last four decades, and a recent analysis [28] calculates
that this extra spending was worth it if at least 30% of the increase in US lifespan was due
to the increase in US spending (assuming a $100,000 life-year value) . It is far from clear,
however, that medicine can claim this much credit. An optimistic accounting of the benefits
of specific treatments attributes only five years of the forty or more years of added lifespan
over the last two centuries to medicine [17]."
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/ ... e-in-half/
"And even if this overall risk-index effect were real, it would represent about fifty days of life gained for the average patient, paid for by roughly 30% more medical spending over a lifetime."
Hanson has reviewed many other studies which essentially show that health has a very weak link to medicine, and a far stronger link to other factors such as: exercise, diet, sleep, smoking, pollution, climate, and social status