Life expectancy is going up due to a variety of factors: better trauma care, better vaccination regimes, better sanitation, better nutrition, some better treatments (some amazingly so).
Nevertheless, a large fraction of medical screens and procedures does not improve average life expectancy when people actually try to measure their impact. Intensive end-of-life care does not improve life expectancy when similarly measured.
not just life expectancy in toto which you would rightly expect to have a huge number of variables that interact in unknown ways. many medical procedures have proven to be directly detrimental to health in double blind studies yet remain standard procedure.
read this to become completely disillusioned with medicine. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/catheter-infection-law...