EWC Insights: Valuing Longer, Healthier Lives: Health Spending in Korea

Increases in life expectancy and medical spending in South Korea have outpaced those of most other countries over recent decades. For healthcare expenditure to increase by 1.5 percentage points of GDP every five years would be unsustainable; yet constraining spending growth without stifling health improvement requires differentiating wasteful or low-value spending from the high-value spending contributing to longer, healthier lives. This webinar will provide an overview of collaborative research developing a Korean “national health account” to understand the value of medical spending by condition, showing for example the critical role of improvements in cardiovascular disease and stroke. Drawing on detailed data from Korea’s national health insurance and other administrative data, we can measure outcomes not only with mortality and morbidity -- as in U.S. studies of conditional-specific net value (Cutler et al. 2022, Weaver et al. 2022) -- but also include greater earnings across the lifecourse enabled by health-improving medical spending. Eggleston will also discuss related research on the “age-friendliness” of Korean occupations (adapting Acemoglu et al. 2022), and how such analyses can help inform policy and social adaptation to population aging.

Karen Eggleston is a POSCO Visiting Fellow at the East-West Center (October-December 2022) and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University, where she is Director of the Asia Health Policy Program, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Eggleston earned her PhD in public policy from Harvard University and MA degrees in economics and Korean studies from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research focuses on healthcare productivity, government and market roles in the health sector, and the economics of the demographic transition in Asia. She has been a Fulbright Scholar in Korea and a consultant or adviser to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policies.

Host or Publisher East-West Center