"Greater Health Spending Helps Men More Than Women, Study Finds"

Submitted by Minuteman on Thu, 2014-01-09 06:44

Link here. Excerpt:

'Increased health spending in developed countries tends to benefit men more than women, a new study finds.

Researchers analyzed data from 27 developed nations to determine the efficiency of health care spending, and found that men had greater gains in life expectancy than women in nearly every country.

"We were surprised to find a large gender gap in spending efficiency throughout the industrialized countries of the world," study author Douglas Barthold, a doctoral candidate in the economics department at McGill University in Montreal, said in a university news release. "The average life expectancy of women rose from 75.5 to 79.8 between 1991 and 2007, while that of men rose from 72.5 to 77.1."
...
It's not clear why increased health spending has benefited men more than women in most of the countries included in the study, the investigators said. They called for further research into the issue.'

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Comments

I suspect it has a lot less to do with spending on health care or research than the drop in the numbers of men smoking and drinking to excess these days as compared to men in the 20th century. But unfortunately, the rate of women smoking and drinking to excess has gone up since then.

Correlation is not causation. Increased healthcare spending may or may not increase longevity unless it just plain keeps you going in an imminent way. Refraining from smoking and drinking to excess however has shown to increase longevity compared to those who don't, all other relevant factors being the same.

And one more thing: Men still aren't living as long as women, on average. Still, men's life expectancy has gone up greater than women's in terms of raw nos. of years or percentages of their previous figures. What's so wrong with that? We're still dying sooner on average than women, after all.

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Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2014-01-10 03:28

You also have to love how they don't mention how women's health issues and research get about double the funding from the government and the general population compared to the male equivalents. Considering this fact, you must be right, Matt. How can spending directly benefit men more, if most of the spending is earmarked for women in the first place?

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Submitted by xtrnl on Fri, 2014-01-10 06:46

We are only talking about a 0.3 year difference here, on average. That's barely 4 months.
So, men benefited by living not even 4 months longer on average and they got to do further research to figure out why?
It's simple: People who suffer the most, have the most to gain from assistance.

They still lived about two years less than the women, on average. How about checking into that "anomaly"?

MAJ

P.S. I put anomaly in quotes because it's not a mystery why men don't live as long.

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Submitted by digital_dreamer on Fri, 2014-01-10 16:54