IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cesifo/v52y2006i1p1-31.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does Ageing Call for a Reform of the Health Care Sector?

Author

Listed:
  • W. M. T. Westerhout

Abstract

A popular view is that ageing populations increase health expenditure to GDP ratios because health expenditure correlates positively with age and because the concomitant shrinking of the labour force depresses GDP. The resulting increase in transfers from the young to the old then calls for a reform of health care policies. This article critically examines the arguments underlying this view. It gives credit to factors that counteract the expenditure effect, the effects upon health care market and labour market distortions and the effects upon intergenerational solidarity. Although important, these factors are found to have insufficient weight to invalidate the popular view. (JEL: H21, I10, J10) Copyright 2006, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • W. M. T. Westerhout, 2006. "Does Ageing Call for a Reform of the Health Care Sector?," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo Group, vol. 52(1), pages 1-31, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:52:y:2006:i:1:p:1-31
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cesifo/ifj001
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Colombier, Carsten & Weber, Werner, 2009. "Projecting health-care expenditure for Switzerland: further evidence against the 'red-herring' hypothesis," MPRA Paper 26747, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Nov 2009.
    2. Roel van Elk & Esther Mot & P.H. Franses, 2009. "Modelling health care expenditures; overview of the literature and evidence from a panel time series model," CPB Discussion Paper 121, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    3. Ried, Walter, 2007. "On the relationship between aging, edical progress and age-specific health care expenditures," Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Diskussionspapiere 08/2007, University of Greifswald, Faculty of Law and Economics.
    4. Rudy Douven & E. Schut, 2006. "Health plan pricing behaviour and managed competition," CPB Discussion Paper 61.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    5. Maria Ana Matias & Rita Santos & Panos Kasteridis & Katja Grasic & Anne Mason & Nigel Rice, 2022. "Approaches to projecting future healthcare demand," Working Papers 186cherp, Centre for Health Economics, University of York.
    6. Casper van Ewijk & Nick Draper & Harry ter Rele & Ed Westerhout, 2006. "Ageing and the sustainability of Dutch public finances," CPB Special Publication 61, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    7. Maciej Lis, 2015. "Red Herring in the Vistula River: Time-to-Death and Health Care Expenditure," IBS Working Papers 13/2015, Instytut Badan Strukturalnych.
    8. Zapji Ymélé Aimé Philombe, 2022. "Interest Charges and the “Said†Ageing-related Expenditures: A Study of OECD Countries," International Journal of Business and Economic Sciences Applied Research (IJBESAR), Democritus University of Thrace (DUTH), Kavala Campus, Greece, vol. 15(3), pages 7-23, December.
    9. Vincenzo Atella & Valentina Conti, 2013. "The effect of age and time to death on health care expenditures: the Italian experience," CEIS Research Paper 267, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 12 Nov 2013.
    10. Ed Westerhout & Frank Pellikaan, 2005. "Can we afford to live longer in better health?," CPB Document 85, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    11. Moore, Patrick V. & Bennett, Kathleen & Normand, Charles, 2017. "Counting the time lived, the time left or illness? Age, proximity to death, morbidity and prescribing expenditures," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 184(C), pages 1-14.
    12. Roel van Elk & Esther Mot & P.H. Franses, 2009. "Modelling health care expenditures; overview of the literature and evidence from a panel time series model," CPB Discussion Paper 121.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    13. Casper van Ewijk & Nick Draper & Harry ter Rele & Ed Westerhout, 2006. "Ageing and the sustainability of Dutch public finances," CPB Special Publication 61.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    14. Carsten Colombier, 2018. "Population ageing in healthcare – a minor issue? Evidence from Switzerland," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 50(15), pages 1746-1760, March.
    15. Atella, Vincenzo & Conti, Valentina, 2014. "The effect of age and time to death on primary care costs: The Italian experience," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 10-17.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H21 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Efficiency; Optimal Taxation
    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • J10 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:52:y:2006:i:1:p:1-31. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.