DyMH_LU: a simple tool for modelling and simulating the health status of the Luxembourgish elderly in the longer run

We are facing one of the most important demographic events of the last decades in Europe: the population ageing process. This process will have significant economic effects particularly on health. As most diseases are age-related, this process might imply a proportionally higher share of individuals with declining health. Being able to forecast the health status of the population can help to deal with concerns about the financial and social sustainability of several public policies including health. In this paper, we present the DyMH_LU model, a dynamic microsimulation model focused exclusively on the health status of the Luxembourgish population. One of its major characteristics is that it simulates more than sixty different diseases and limitations in the activities of daily living. All this simulated information can be aggregated in order to compute, for each period, the overall health status of each individual, the marginal distribution of each disease among the total population and the global health status of the entire population. The starting point of the DyMH_LU model is the information collected in 2015 in the Wave 6 of the SHARE database that targets individuals aged 51 or older. The simulation period covers 2017 until 2045.