Does increased spending in health care explain the sharp upturn in life expectancy in the Netherlands?

Background: While life expectancy in most high-income countries increased remarkably since the second half of the 20th century, the Netherlands witnessed a longer period of slow improvements during the 1980 s and 90 s followed by a sudden and sharp upturn in the recent decade. It has been suggested that improved health care utilization for the elderly was partly responsible for this change. We explored the possible contribution of increasing health care expenditures, to explain the break point and size of the increase in Dutch life expectancy, which occurred in 2002. Methods: We applied multivariate panel regres…