Prolonging Living or Prolonging Dying?

dadx
Mon, 08 Aug 2016 15:38:06 +0000

Then, too, the cost of maintaining life is very, very expensive, a majority of health care costs come from the last couple of months of life (I think the last I heard was 70%, but def more than 50%). Among other things, how many people who need medical treatment could be treated with the money spent keeping people alive those couple of months?

These are complicated issues, and I think some of the quoted statistics probably don’t paint the accurate picture. Obviously there is often heavier medicare billing during the final year of life, but it may not be exactly what it is portrayed to be.

See question 7 regarding amounts spend during the decedents last year. (note that this is per capita).

http://kff.org/medicare/fact-sheet/10-faqs-medicares-role-in-end-of-life-care/

And from that section:

Other research shows over the past several decades, roughly one-quarter of traditional Medicare spending for health care is for services provided to beneficiaries ages 65 and older in their last year of life.

I’m not interested in seeing money spent unnecessarily, but the actual picture isn’t necessarily what its sometimes portrayed to be.

Kaiser has lots of studies on medicare and other public health spending and I’m depressed each time I read one of them. Things will be changing before long. How, is the question.