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What this means in terms of the overall healthcare debate: - A very large percentage of total lifetime healthcare spending is often spent during the last few d
by grandalf 10y ago
What this means in terms of the overall healthcare debate:
- A very large percentage of total lifetime healthcare spending is often spent during the last few days of life.
- Many of the extreme measures taken in the last days of life are extremely painful and lead to significant suffering for the patient (and rarely work).
- Even when someone is quite old, we view death as unnatural and lean heavily on expensive technology to try to push it off.
- Wrapped up in this is the authority we grant physicians. It is socially difficult for a physician to advise against "hope" that a costly and painful intervention will save a patient's life, even though the vast majority of physicians would not choose such interventions for themselves or their family members.
- Since the cost pattern is well understood and risk pools favor the old with costly healthcare needs, the young people in society pay dearly for the $50K treatment that usually fails to let an 80 year old live a few extra months.
- The simplest way to reduce healthcare costs would be to simply allow people to opt out of costly extreme measures once they are elderly, in exchange for significant savings.
- ska 10y agoThe fly in this particular ointment is consent and liability. Which isn't to say I disagree, just that it isn't nearly as easy as you make it sound in practice, regardless if we feel it should be. Particularly in the current legal framework.
- grandalf 10y agoExcellent point, and totally accurate. There is also the issue that those who would tend to spend less on insurance (more likely to be poor) would be considered dead sooner (all else being equal) than a wealthy person, which might alarm some people, even though the majority of the time the wealthy person is merely tortured for a few days before he/she finally dies.