Inpatient/outpatient health care costs and remaining years of life--effect of decreasing mortality on future acute health care demand.

The article introduces a method that may be used to estimate how demographic changes may affect future demand for inpatient/outpatient health care. The method is useful in order to refine estimation of demographic influence on demand in the process of health human resources planning. Empirical evidence focuses on the connection between health care costs and remaining years of life. We estimate the demographically determined rise in inpatient/outpatient health care demand in Sweden in the period 2000-2030. The increase arrived at, by means of our method, is circa 37% lower than estimates done with a simple demographical extrapolation, which does not take the decreasing mortality pattern into account.