Accounting for future costs in Medicare

The relationship between the health of an insured population and the costs of insuring them is a lot more complicated than might first appear. The excellent paper by Geoffrey Joyce and colleagues helps explain why. The obvious interaction between health status and longevity, interacting with the issue of how long the insurer remains responsible for care of a particular person, is central. So is the cost of improving health status. And perhaps most importantly, the relationship between health care use and costs in the United States is not as straightforward as is generally assumed.