The Disease of Death - Where the savings exist

With his mother’s death in 2005, Kitzhaber lived the absurdities of the present system. Medicare would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests but would not pay $18 an hour for a non-hospice care giver to come into Annabel’s home and help her through her final days.

“The fundamental problem is that one percent of the population accounts for 35 percent of health care spending,” he said. “So the big question is not how we pay for health care, but what are we buying.”

He is not, he says, in favor of pulling the plug on granny. The culture of life should be paramount, he says, following the oath he took as a doctor.

More sensible voices have since joined the debate, asking how we reform a system that lavishes most of its benefits on a cure for the “disease” of aging. President Obama has talked about squeezing billions of waste, fraud and abuse from Medicare. But he has yet to admit the obvious: those savings can only come from changing the way the system treats dying people.

About $67 billion — nearly a third of the money spent by Medicare — goes to patients in the last two years of life. The need to spend less money at the end of life “is the elephant in the room,” Evan Thomas wrote in “The Case for Killing Granny,” the cover story in last week’s Newsweek. “Everyone sees it but no one wants to talk about it.”

Death is indeed the "Elephant in the room" - As the boomers get older, treating death as a curable disease will bankrupt us all.

We don't accept age or death right now - will we?

Posted via web from Rob's posterous