Misterimpatient

I wrote:

Thinking about it some more, this whole concept of waste is interesting. What does it mean that “youth is wasted on the young”? I think it’s just a comment on a young person’s lack of appreciation for the benefits of being young. I have much more to write on the topic of wasted “resources”.

I’m thinking about the spending we do in the last year of life. I had the feeling that we spend a TON of money on that last year. Here is one of many pieces of data on the web. This is published by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and of course this data is for the United States.

In addition, last-year-of-life expenses constituted 22 percent of all medical, 26 percent of Medicare, 25 percent of Medicaid, and 18 percent of all non-Medicare expenditures.

So more then 1 in 5 American healthcare dollars are essentially futile investments. Something is not right here. What if the same money were spent on schools for underprivileged kids or healthcare for the same? From the same source, I have this snippet:

The mean annual medical expenditures (1996 dollars) for the elderly from 1992 to 1996 were $37,581 during the last year of life versus $7,365 for other years.

Here in Massachusetts, the 2005 per pupil spending on education (grades K-12) is $9080. I’ll concede there are more kids in school each year then elderly in the last year of life (thank God), but my point is simple. We spend more on what we value more. We may spend more on Education (may, I’m not sure) but per pupil we clearly are willing to spend more on that last year then all the years that go to making engaged and contributing members of society. I think the balance is wrong.

At the risk of undercutting my argument, I’ll add that we don’t always know when the last year of life is beginning but consider this one last data point: Half of that last year expense is for the last 60 days. Folks must have a pretty good clue by then. No?

Later…

Filed by misterimpatient at 9:27 pm under Patter