More spending has lead to better health outcomes

That is according to a paper by Weaver et al. (2022). The authors use expenditure data from the Disease Expenditure Project and DALYs from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017.  Evaluating the data from 1996-2016, the authors find that:

Across all causes of health care spending and disease burden, median spending was US$114,339 per DALY [disability-adjusted life year] averted between 1996 and 2016. Twelve of thirty-four causes with the highest spending or highest burden had median spending that was less than $100,000 per DALY averted. Using decomposition results, we calculated an outcome-adjusted health care price index by assigning a dollar value to DALYs averted per case. When we used $100,000 as the dollar value per DALY averted, prices increased by 4 percent more than the broader economy; when we used $150,000 per DALY averted, relative prices fell by 13 percent, meaning that much of the growth in health care spending over time has purchased health improvements.

The full article is here.