Goodman, Michael R. with Gary B. Hirsch, Ben R. Forsyth and William H. Luginbuhl, "Assessing the Economic Impact of Medical Interventions: What is the Price of Success?", 1983
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Certain medical interventions may result in reducesd costs to society. Others, however, by keeping people alive longer, may cause higher costs to be incurred for continuing health care and disability and retirement payments. A generic disease process model for projecting the implications of various medical interventions is presented. The model is applied to myocardial infarction in the U.S. male population and results of simulating several interventions specific to that disease process are discussed. Conclusions are drawn and it is argued that this model is useful for identifying interventions that result in higher costs to society in order that adequate resources be set aside to cover these costs. The work reported in this paper was funded by a grant from the Kaiser Family Foundation.