From the Department of Potentially Misleading Facts and Figures
So everyone is blogging about this chart, which was pulled together by AEI’s Andrew Biggs:
The potential significance of these data for any number of common understandings of the factors behind rising medical costs is immediate, but – and speaking as a statistical ignoramus, so pillar of salt and all that – the way that they’re being presented here is doing some pretty significant work, isn’t it? Crucially, it seems clear to me that the numbers should at least be calculated in terms of per capita expenditures, since as it stands we aren’t shown how much of the total growth in each case is due to simple increases in human and non-human animal populations. And based on what I could glean from a quick search, the U.S. pet population increased by about 17% from 2001 to 2007 alone, which would give an annual growth rate of almost 3% in contrast to a U.S. population growth rate of about a third of that. Biggs’s graph (I couldn’t figure out how to dig his original data out from the Consumer Expenditure Survey) does suggest an increase in veterinary expenditures more on the order of 30% or so during that same stretch, so it’s clearly not as if there hasn’t been a notable increase in veterinary expenditures per pet, but not accounting for this sort of complicating factor seems a significant omission, no?
I’m sure a better number-cruncher than I could use this as an inspiration to put a more revealing chart together – get to work, Conor Clarke! – but in any case the data were interesting enough that I thought it worth pressing on them a bit.
Well, anecdote and data and all such caveats, but mightn’t the increase in “pet health expenses” or whatever you want to call it also be driven by the increased availability of advanced treatments like chemotherapy for pets? Where we used to euthanize the pets with cancers and such, veterinarians can now perform life-extending treatments, orthopedic surgeries, and whatnot. Also, medications previously only available for human consumption are now used in pets — Celebrex, for example, can treat hip dysplasia and arthritis in dogs.
— Erik Vanderhoff · Jul 14, 04:49 PM · #
I absolutely agree that that’s a significant part of the story, and that that has real lessons for how we think about the increasing amounts that we spend on health care for ourselves; my only point was that the “Pets vs. People” comparison is likely to be a bit more complicated than the original chart made it seem.
— John Schwenkler · Jul 14, 05:04 PM · #
Well, I must confess, I didn’t think your post was saying much of anything at all…
— Erik Vanderhoff · Jul 14, 08:07 PM · #
Gee, thanks. Charmed.
— John Schwenkler · Jul 14, 08:28 PM · #
Erik:
If you read Manzi’s post above, I think you’ll see that the chart doesn’t exactly show what Megan says. It is not a chart that
As Jim points out, (and as Schwenkler pointed towards) human health care expenditures rose at a much greater rate than pet health expenditures. And then when you factor in the the difference between pet costs and human costs ($127 vs. $7400), Schwenkler’s post was saying even more than HE thought.
— jd · Jul 14, 08:33 PM · #
Yeah, I’d touched on that in an earlier draft, actually.
— John Schwenkler · Jul 14, 08:37 PM · #
Sorry, John, that was a tad dick of me.
— Erik Vanderhoff · Jul 14, 10:37 PM · #
No problem, Erik – I appreciate the apology.
— John Schwenkler · Jul 14, 11:06 PM · #
So then the euthanasia options as a means of controlling health care costs is still on the table?
— C3 · Jul 15, 03:44 AM · #