I was most struck by these grafs in this excellent New York Times article about living wills and the cost to society of prolonging end of life care, "End-of-Life Issues Need to Be Addressed":
The system is not saving lives, Dr. Gordon says. “We’re torturing patients by prolonging their deaths. And the cost to society is astronomical.”
He cited a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1993. It found that about 30 percent of Medicare dollars are spent during the last year of life, and half of that is spent during the last 60 days. In 2009 dollars, Dr. Gordon calculated, that amounts to $70 billion a year, much of it spent on futile care that prolongs suffering.
This “incredibly expensive end-of-life care” detracts from the health care system’s ability to finance preventive care, Dr. Charles A. Bush, the medical director of Richard M. Ross Heart Hospital at the Ohio State University, told me.
In addition to their high cost, common life-prolonging interventions can result in a host of debilitating or costly complications, like repeated infections, mental deterioration, serious drug reactions and persistent pain and discomfort. That doesn’t even include the distress experienced by family members tending to loved ones hooked up to myriad tubes and devices.
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