Economic Impact of Healthcare

For thousands of years, medical practitioners have attempted to reduce pain, cure disease, extend lifespan and generally improve quality of life.
The immense technological progress of the past 30 years has enabled great advances to be made in the treatment of disease. This is reflected statistically in life expectancies, which have increased significantly over the past decades. However, longer life expectancy creates new medical issues, particularly with regard to the longevity of organs and tissues that must now function for longer periods of time. At present, organ transplantation is the only possible therapy for some patients. Thus, as life expectancy increases, so too does the demand for donor organs (Table 1). In the USA alone, 90 000 patients were waiting for organs in 2006.1 Furthermore, the treatment and care of patients undergoing such treatment are costly [more than US$400 billion per year in the USA (Tables 1 and 2)]. Although the use of synthetic materials aids in keeping people alive, many implants function only to a limited extent like living tissues. Unlike real tissues, which are in a constant state of renewal, synthetic implants begin to show signs of decomposition within 10–15 years and must eventually be replaced. Therefore, a key goal of regenerative medicine is to develop artificially generated tissues, which can take over the function of the original tissue without being rejected by the patient’s immune system.

Table 1 Number of transplants performed in 2005 and impact for the general public. 

Table .2 Cost of treating the most expensive diseases in 2005.