New York Times: E.P.A. Drops Age-Based Cost Studies

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May 8, 2003

E.P.A. Drops Age-Based Cost Studies

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JOHN TIERNEY

ALTIMORE, May 7 — A Bush administration policy to base some regulations on a calculation that the life of each person older than 70 should be valued less than the life of a younger person has antagonized older Americans and environmental groups, and it has stirred tensions among federal agencies.

Instead of the traditional assumption that all lives saved from cleaner air are worth the same, administration officials in two environmental studies included an alternative method that used two values, $3.7 million for the life a person younger than 70 and $2.3 million for an older person, a 37 percent difference.

Critics call the policy the "senior death discount" and say the administration is turning on older Americans as a rationale to weaken environmental regulations.

Today, Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said her agency had never applied the policy in its decision making and never would.

"The senior discount factor has been stopped," Mrs. Whitman told reporters at a meeting here. "It has been discontinued. E.P.A. will not, I repeat, not, use an age-adjusted analysis in decision making."

D. Graham, the regulations administrator at the Office of Management and Budget who has been the champion of the policy, said the calculation would not be used because it was based on an old study. Dr. Graham insisted he was committed to the principle of analyzing how many years of life would be added by a particular measure, not simply the number of lives.

He has proposed that all agencies' cost-benefit calculations include the "life expectancy" method and the simpler "statistical lives" approach.

"My instinct has always been to present policy makers and the public with both perspectives, so you can get a sense of the difference," he said.

The life-expectancy approach could bolster the case for health measures that benefit children, Dr. Graham said, and in some cases it could help the elderly.

"It can distinguish a regulation that may extend senior citizens' life by 5 or 10 years, compared to a regulation that will extend their life by only one year," he said.

A spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, Trent Duffy, made clear that in considering the cost-benefit calculations the administration should not be seen as insensitive.

"The Bush administration's commitment to human life should not be questioned," Mr. Duffy said. "The Bush administration has been aggressive in protecting human life of all ages, from extending prenatal care benefits for pregnant women to filing a friend of the court brief against euthanasia in Oregon."

The life-expectancy analysis, intended to identify policies that would add the most years to people's lives, also accompanied two cost-benefit analyses at the E.P.A., as well as at other agencies in the Clinton administration. Critics say it has been used more aggressively under the leadership of Dr. Graham, a bête noire of environmentalists who has been urging rigorous cost-benefit analyses for all federal agencies.

For more than a month, the elderly and environmental groups have protested at hearings on the relatively arcane cost-benefit methodology. The "death discount" debate offers a window on tensions between Ms. Whitman's agency and Dr. Graham's, tensions worsened by Dr. Graham's broad power and authority. At stake are billions of dollars — and thousands of lives — as the government weighs the costs of regulating pollution against the benefits to health and the environment.

Environmentalists say the problem with Dr. Graham's approach is that it inflates the costs of regulations and diminishes the perceived benefits, making it easier for the administration to propose a relaxation of rules.

Carol M. Browner, the E.P.A. administrator in the Clinton administration, said that under the traditional method a particular air pollution regulation was shown to have benefits of $77 billion but that the life-expectancy method, along with other more conservative assumptions, would lower the benefits, to $8 billion.

"They are adjusting the calculations to say that the benefits of less pollution are much lower," Ms. Browner said.

Although similar analyses were conducted when she was administrator, she said, no decisions were based on them.

Dr. Graham, founder of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, said the life-expectancy analysis was being used merely to provide extra guidance, not set policy. He noted that the Food and Drug Administration had used it for nearly a decade.

Other experts said that moral and practical reasons gave priority to policies to protect younger people because those policies add the most years of life, but that those arguments were not easy for politicians to make when confronting elderly voters.

In an interview, Dr. Graham said the $1.4 million difference was not longer considered valid because it was based on outdated studies in England and Canada that were not relevant here. He insisted that the overall approach was valid and would be a factor in decision making at the E.P.A. and elsewhere.

Asked outside the meeting whether it was the elderly and environmentalists' protests that had prompted her to change her mind about the policy, Mrs. Whitman said: "It was never a question of changing our minds. We weren't the ones who . . . "

Mrs. Whitman said her agency's officials did not want to base any of their decisions on life-expectancy analysis.

"We are more comfortable with the traditional methodology we've been using because it has been peer reviewed, it's what we've been using right along, and a lot of environmental economists would say that is the more appropriate methodology to use," she said. "This life-span one is fine if you're talking about medical determinations. Does it make more sense to give scarce lung transplants to someone 75 or someone 17? That's when they use the life expectancy. But we don't think that that's as appropriate for the work that we do."

Representatives of environmental groups at the meeting today said Mrs. Whitman's announcement quelled critics who were going to speak against it. They were not impressed with her announcement, saying, as Stanton, an air expert with the National Environmental Trust, put it, "She was as clear as mud."

Mrs. Whitman, however, acknowledged that Dr. Graham's method would still accompany her agency's studies, including those on President Bush's "Clear Skies" proposal.

Those methods, with higher costs and lower benefits, would be available to members of Congress.

Environmentalists said if the agency was not using the life-expectancy method, it should expunge it. Milton C. Weinstein, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a pioneer of life-expectancy analysis, said it had become routine among medical researchers but still aroused controversy.

"There's an equity argument that every citizen should be entitled to an equal claim on resources and shouldn't be penalized for the fact that they've lived a larger portion of their life span," Professor Weinstein said. "But you can never save a life. You can only prolong it. When you give medical treatment or make the environment safer, the relevant question is how much of a life you can save. Most people, if given the choice between applying resources to save a 10-year-old or a 70-year-old, would choose the 10-year-old."

Many environmentalists have been skeptical of cost-benefit analyses and have accused Republicans of using them as an excuse not to regulate polluting industries and other environmental hazards. They spoke out against the appointment of Dr. Graham, one of the most prominent experts in regulatory cost-benefit analysis.

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