Also, several illnesses other than cancer should be looked at simultaneously, which would be very data demanding. As an alternative, life expectancy can be selected as the health variable. It could be argued that life expectancy variables show little variation among OECD countries and over time (and thus do not help discriminating between policy effects). However, weak variability among countries does not seem to be borne out by the data, even if only OECD countries are considered11.