SummaryIn this paper, we hypothesize that education is associated with a higher efficiency of health investment, yet that this efficiency advantage is solely driven by intelligence. We operationalize efficiency of health investment as the probability of dying conditional on a certain hospital diagnosis and estimate a multistate structural equation model with three states: (i) healthy, (ii) hospitalized, and (iii) death. We use data from a Dutch cohort born around 1940 that links intelligence tests at age 12 years to later‐life hospitalization and mortality records. The results indicate that intelligent individuals have a clear survival advantage for most hospital diagnoses, while the remaining disparities across education groups are small and not statistically significant. © 2016 The Authors. Health Economics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.