A nightmare that doctors overwhelmingly choose to avoid when they die themselves

[HiPointDem]

114. I'm sure they do. But they perform unneeded procedures and profit off pointless care during

the rest of life as well.

And it's not always easy to tell going in what will be the pointless care and what won't.

Most people over 65 don't die in hospitals and most people aren't in the hospital during the last 2 months of life.

The graphic highlights the point that $50 Billion (!!!) is spent yearly by Medicare on patients in the last 2 months of life. Wow, that sounds horrible!!

But about 2.5 million people die every year. Over 1.8 million of them are 65 and over; about 75%.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/dvs/deaths_2010_release.pdf

So that's about 26K/person. It includes all Medicare costs, including pharmaceuticals, hospice, and regular outpatient doctor or clinic visits. Tegular care, not just extreme care, not just hospitalizations.

1/3 of Medicare recipients die at home.
1/4 die in a hospital.
Average length of hospitalization is 10.9 days.
42% of Medicare recipients are on hospice care at time of death.

30% of Medicare recipients have an ICU stay during the last two months of life.

I'm not finding any good stats for average Medicare ICU stay in last months of life. However, for advanced lung cancer patients over 66:

22% have an ICU stay in the last 6 months of life.
87% of that 22% have only one ICU stay.
only 1/4 of that 22% is mechanically ventilated.
average stay = 5.9 days.
median = 4 days

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/576083_3


To me this suggests more that medical care is very expensive, not that people are getting too much hospital/ICU care. It also doesn't suggest that there's a large percent of the elderly population that's dying after being "hooked up to a ventilator & tubes" for a long time -- or even a short time.