TY  - JOUR
AU  - Cutler, David M
AU  - Ghosh, Kaushik
AU  - Landrum, Mary Beth
TI  - Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity In the Elderly U.S. Population
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 19268
PY  - 2013
Y2  - August 2013
DO  - 10.3386/w19268
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19268
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19268.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
David M. Cutler
Department of Economics
Harvard University
1875 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA  02138
Tel: 617/496-5216
Fax: 617/496-8951
E-Mail: dcutler@harvard.edu

Kaushik Ghosh
NBER
1050 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02138
E-Mail: ghoshk@nber.org

Mary Beth Landrum
Harvard Medical School
Department of Health Care Policy
180 Longwood Avenue
Boston, MA  02115-5899
Tel: (617) 432-2460
Fax: (617) 432-2563
E-Mail: landrum@hcp.med.harvard.edu
M1  - published as David M. Cutler, Kaushik Ghosh, Mary Beth Landrum. "Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity in the Elderly U.S. Population," in David A. Wise, editor, "Discoveries in the Economics of Aging" University of Chicago Press (2014)

M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2013-11-11
AB  - The question of whether morbidity is being compressed into the period just before death has been at the center of health debates in the United States for some time.  Compression of morbidity would lead to longer life but less rapid medical spending increases than if life extension were accompanied by expanding morbidity.  Using nearly 20 years of data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, we examine how health is changing by time period until death.  We show that functional measures of health are improving, and more so the farther away from death the person is surveyed.  Disease rates are relatively constant at all times until death.  On net, there is strong evidence for compression of morbidity based on measured disability, but less clear evidence based on disease-free survival.
ER  -