Health Affairs ’ July Issue: Advanced Illness & End-of-Life Care

The July issue of Health Affairs explores topics related to advanced illness and end-of-life care. Often when needs are as much social and spiritual as they are medical, people are confronted with a fragmented, rescue-driven health care system that produces miraculous results but also disastrous failures. The July issue of Health Affairs was supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Medical spending in last year of life is lower than previously reported Shedding new light on end-of-life medical spending, data from eight countries and the Canadian province of Quebec suggest that high costs associated with the final year of life make up only a modest share of aggregate spending. An international team led by Eric French of University College London and the Institute for Fiscal Studies in the United Kingdom measured the magnitude of medical spending in the last 12 months and last three years of life. The authors found that 8.5–11.2 percent of overall spending took place in those in last 12 months — significantly less than spending on those in the final three years of life, which accounted for, on average, 24.5 percent of overall costs. Hospital spending is more concentrated at the end of life, accounting for 44.2 percent of medical care spending in the last year of life in the US, compared to 36.3 percent, on average, over the last three years of life (see the exhibit above). While some terminal illnesses generate short periods of concentrated expenditure, the au...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Elsewhere@ Health Affairs Source Type: blogs