By Sy Mukherjee on Feb 1, 2013 at 10:30
am
According to a new study released by
the Journal of General Internal Medicine, out-of-pocket medical spending in the
last five years of life left one in four American seniors bankrupt.
The study found that
average “out-of-pocket expenditures in the 5 years prior to death were $38,688
for individuals, and $51,030 for couples in which one spouse dies.” That
average was skewed upwards by staggeringly high out-of-pocket medical spending
by seniors who had particularly expensive medical needs. All told, a full “25
percent of subjects’ expenditures exceeded baseline total household assets, and
43 percent of subjects’ spending surpassed their non-housing assets,” according
to the report.
The study’s findings
underscore the fact that, despite Medicare coverage — which is more efficient and cost-effective compared
to private insurance — health care consumption by seniors suffering from costly
diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s can often drive up prices to an
unsustainable rate.
That represents the simple
reality of the costs of treating diseases for which there are still no cures. Seventy
percent of national health care expenses derive from just 10 percent of
the population, usually by terminally ill Americans.
But when conservative
politicians use that figure to justify radical cuts to social safety net
programs, their logic simply doesn’t add up. Shifting ailing patients away from
publicly financed insurance programs and into the private market only drives up
health care costs and uncompensated care rates by forcing people to pursue
treatment that they cannot afford — and those policies would simply force even
more seniors to exceed their non-housing assets to pay for their medical costs.
The solution to this issue lies in finding more cost-effective treatments for
costly diseases, not leaving seniors to their own devices to figure out how to
pay for their health care.
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