Health Care Matters: Pharmaceuticals, Obesity, and the Quality of Life

The findings demonstrate that pharmaceutical consumption is more powerful in improving the quality of life than in simply increasing life expectancy. The authors also find that the productivity of pharmaceutical consumption varies greatly by cause of death and by age. For individuals under seventy, pharmaceutical consumption is very helpful in lowering circulatory disease mortality but has little effect on mortality due to either cancer or respiratory disease. At later ages, pharmaceutical consumption is generally productive. Health Care Matters is one of the first studies to use the newly available World Health Organization (WHO) disability-adjusted life expectancy (DALE) data, new international data on obesity, and new data on specific diseases.