Healthy Ageing and Healthcare Expenditure
| Author: | Mgr. Petr Mach |
|---|---|
| Year: | 2021 - summer |
| Leaders: | PhDr. Lucie Bryndová |
| Consultants: | |
| Work type: | Finance, Financial Markets and Banking Masters |
| Language: | English |
| Pages: | 78 |
| Awards and prizes: | |
| Link: | https://dspace.cuni.cz/handle/20.500.11956/150257 |
| Abstract: | In the recent decades, a significant demographic shift is underway, with increasing life expectancy and falling fertility rates, causing a change in the age structure of populations. This introduces a problem for the sustainability of many modern social systems, which rely on funds from the economically active population to pay for the increased expenses of the elderly population. Over the last few decades, two scenarios that would alleviate the problem have been proposed. One is the compression of morbidity or healthy ageing, which assumes that a large part of the gains in life expectancy will be spent in good health, thus reducing the pressure on the healthcare system. The other being the concept of death-related costs hypothesis which assumes that a large portion of the older populations healthcare costs is tied to the death of the individual, which would mean that the increasing life expectancy would just shift the existing healthcare expenses to older age at the same rate as the increase in life expectancy. This thesis provides information on the situation in the Czech Republic, and whether any of these scenarios are present in the data from the last 20 years, which could be relied on to improve the healthcare system financing in the following years. The analysis of the average Czech healthcare expenditures by age does indicate that death-related costs might play a significant role in Czechia, but this needs to be confirmed by further research on the topic The second analysis of SHARE data did not provide any evidence that the levels of disability have changed between the years 2007 and 2013. On the contrary, an increase in the proportion of women with ADL limitations was found. |
