In the world of medicine, technology is in a constant state of change and evolution. With these changes, comes an increase in the cost of attaining the benefits to be reaped by the newfound technologies. In an effort to determine if the cost of the changes in care is validated, David M. Cutler and Mark McClellan conducted research and documented their findings in their paper: Is Technological Change In Medicine Worth It? To prevent too many confounding variables, the study focuses on “five conditions: heart attacks; low-birthweight babies; depression; cataracts; and breast cancer” (Culter and McClellan 2). Each condition and its subsequent costs are evaluated on the scale of whether the whether the costs of the technology outweighs the health benefits or vise versa. The results, overall, yielded that health benefits, both in life expectancy and quality of life, outweigh the cost of new technologies. With the exception of the subject of breast cancer, which proved equal, all of the other subjects were increased life expectancy and quality of life following the use of said technology. This data was collected by determining the change (increase) in medical technological costs and compared to the benefits, in terms of increase of life expectancy. …show more content…
To show a better understanding of the change, the research includes the differences from separate years. This provides a sizable range to draw upon to comprehend the increases in costs. In terms of both depression and cataracts, those already being treated did not seem to incur additional costs with staggering improvements in quality of life. Similarly, the conditions of low-birthweight infants and heart attack both saw increase in life expectancy on average. Unlike the two former conditions, both saw increase in treatment cost, although said costs were outweighed by the benefits of