Impact macro-économique du vieillissement de la population sur les dépenses d’assurance maladie en France

A model is put forward to measure the impact of population aging on public health expenditures in France by 2020. This model has a central •mechanical” scenario, which consists in applying the expenditure by age observed today to the pyramid of future ages. Although its principle is simple, the scenario is based on a modelling of the link between expenditure and age as the empirical averages are unreliable. The first part of the article provides a detailed description of this modelling in which the central scenario results in an increase in public health expenditure by 0.7 percentage points of GDP due solely to the impact of aging. The second part of the article is a critical examination of this same central scenario, in particular its hypothesis of stability of expenditure at a given age. The first factor that is likely to cause expenditure by age to vary is obviously health status, that is, if people are more healthy at a given age, this means that the central scenario has overestimated the impact of aging. Among other factors, the drop in age at death would decrease the central scenario’s estimate by 0.2 percentage points of GDP.