Counting the time lived or the time left? : age, proximity to death and prescription expenditures

Abstract

This thesis set out to investigate whether ageing is a surrogate measure for proximity to death in the older population when estimating medication expenditures. The medication expenditures used were the ingredient cost of medications for the public health system. Concerns about the long term sustainability of health care expenditures and in particular prescribing expenditures has become an important policy issue in most developed countries. Previous studies suggest that proximity to death (PTD) has a significant effect on total health care expenditures, with its exclusion leading to an overestimation of likely growth. There are limited studies of pharmaceutical expenditures taking PTD into account.