Is Futile Care the Issue in Health Costs?

Timothy Taylor writes,

The gains from reducing costs of end-of-life care shouldn’t be overstated. The proportion of Medicare spending that goes to end-of-life care has been roughly the same for the last few decades at about 25%. This regularity suggests that while overall health care costs have been rising, end-of-life care is not an increasing part of that overall issue. Intriguingly, Aldridge and Kelley report: “Medicare expenditures in the last year of life decrease with age, especially for those aged 85 or older … This is in large part because the intensity of medical care in the last year of life decreases with increasing age.” Indeed, older adults as a group are a minority of those with the highest health care costs in any given year

Read the whole thing. His Aldridge-Kelly citation is to a report of the sort that only Tim Taylor seems to dig up.

4 thoughts on “Is Futile Care the Issue in Health Costs?

  1. “Futile care” (in hind sight of course) is just another symptom of the 3rd party payer problem. Addressing the former rather than the later is at best a band-aid. I don’t know why it is so appealing to some people. Is it because they really want the control so they focus on non sequiturs, or is it that the 3rd party payer is sacrosanct so their “desired cause” is what is left?

  2. 5% of the population gets 60% of the healthcare spending. Where’s the Occupy Wall Street crowd?

    • Maybe they are getting finance degrees to get jobs on wall street.

      Redistribution isn’t the only way to get at other people’s money.

  3. Might it be that the reason the number for medicare spending doesn’t go up In the older ages is because many of them are receiving long-term care via skilled nursing which is not covered by Medicare to any significant degree.

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