How Does New Medical Technology Affect Health Care Spending and Costs?
While a particular new technology may either increase or decrease health care spending, researchers generally agree that, taken together, advances in medical technology have contributed to rising overall U.S. health care spending. Rettig describes how new medical technology affects the costs of health care through the following “mechanisms of action”:5 • Development of new treatments for previously untreatable terminal conditions, including long-term maintenance therapy for treatment of such diseases as diabetes, end-stage renal disease, and AIDS; • Major advances in clinical ability to treat previously untreatable acute conditions, such as coronary artery bypass graft; • Development of new procedures for discovering and treating secondary diseases within a disease, such as erythropoietin to treat anemia in dialysis patients; • Expansion of the indications for a treatment over time, increasing the patient population to which the treatment is applied; • On-going, incremental improvement
