Author Interviews, Cost of Health Care, End of Life Care, Geriatrics, JAMA, Medicare / 23.05.2018
Rate of End-of-Life Medicare Spending Falls
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
William B Weeks, MD, PhD, MBA
The Dartmouth Institute
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: The background for the study is that a common narrative is that end-of-life healthcare costs are driving overall healthcare cost growth. Growth in end-of-life care has been shown, in research studies through the mid 2000’s, to be attributable to increasing intensity of care at the end-of-life (i.e., more hospitalizations and more use of ICUs).
The main findings of our study are that indeed there have been substantial increases in per-capita end-of-life care costs within the Medicare fee-for-service population between 2004-2009, but those per-capita costs dropped pretty substantially between 2009-2014. Further, the drop in per-capita costs attributable to Medicare patients who died (and were, therefore, at the end-of-life) accounts for much of the mitigation in cost growth that has been found since 2009 in the overall Medicare fee-for-service population.
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