The impact of aging on healthcare expenditure (HCE) has been at the center of a prolonged debate. This paper purports to shed light on several issues of this debate by presenting new evidence on the "red herring" hypothesis advanced by Zweifel, Felder and Meier (1999). This hypothesis amounts to...

There is agreement among health economists that on the whole medical innovation causes health care expenditures (HCE) to rise. This paper analyzes for which diagnoses and in which age groups HCE per patient have grown significantly faster than average HCE. We distinguish decedents (patients in...

The impact of aging on healthcare expenditure (HCE) has been at the center of a prolonged debate. This paper purports to shed light on several issues. First, it presents new evidence on the relative importance of the two components of HCE that have been distinguished by Zweifel, Felder and Meier...

Research has shown that older individuals are far more likely to avail of health care and there is concern in a number of countries that the trend toward population ageing may mean that health care expenditures increase to unsustainable levels. However, there is a growing body of evidence that...

There is agreement among health economists that on the whole medical innovation causes health care expenditures (HCE) to rise. This paper analyzes for which diagnoses and in which age groups HCE per patient have grown significantly faster than average HCE. We distinguish decedents (patients in...

There is agreement among health economists that on the whole medical innovation causes health care expenditures (HCE) to rise. This paper analyzes for which diagnoses and in which age groups HCE per patient have grown significantly faster than average HCE. We distinguish decedents (patients in...

There is agreement among health economists that on the whole medical innovation causes health care expenditures (HCE) to rise. This paper analyzes for which diagnoses and in which age groups HCE per patient have grown significantly faster than average HCE. We distinguish decedents (patients in...

The impact of aging on healthcare expenditure (HCE) has been at the center of a prolonged debate. This paper purports to shed light on several issues of this debate by presenting new evidence on the "red herring" hypothesis advanced by Zweifel, Felder and Meier (1999). This hypothesis amounts to...

A large body of literature, mainly based on hospital costs, shows that time to death (TTD) is by far a better predictor of health spending than age. In this paper, we investigate if this finding holds true also in presence of outpatient costs (drugs, diagnostic tests and specialist visits). Our...