Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Robin Hanson has taken to Cato Unbound to explain how our spending on medicine has very little effect on net heath outcomes.  The evidence he sites seems strong, and when he actually crunches the numbers of what people pay for an extra 5 days of life through medicine compared to an extra 6 years by living in a rural area or an extra 15 years by regular exercise, the discepancies are rather stunning:

 Note that someone willing to pay $1,000 to gain 2.5 days of life should be willing to spend about $1,000,000 to gain six years by living rurally, and $2,000,000 to gain fifteen years via high exercise. These figures seem to me to overestimate the observed eagerness to live rurally or to exercise.

My immediate, non health wonk or economist, response is that the data Robin presents could provide a strong justification for rather stark or extreme cost controls or even limits on what people pay for health care and then distributing health care dollars universally at lower per capita amounts than are currently being spent on health care.