WSJ: The Crushing Cost of Senior Care
Each year, a small portion of Medicare beneficiaries—most of whom are seniors—consume a disproportionately large amount of federal resources for their inpatient and outpatient care, and those costs will only grow, reports the Wall Street Journal.
A primary goal of the 2010 health-care overhaul that the Supreme Court upheld last week is to slow the growth of costs. Even so, the law does little to address a simple fact: A sliver of the sickest patients account for the majority of U.S. health-care spending. In 2009, the top 10% of Medicare beneficiaries who received hospital care accounted for 64% of the program’s hospital spending, the Journal’s analysis found.
Younger patients… [represent] just 18.5% of the beneficiaries who received hospital care but 23.7% of the total cost. Seniors vastly outnumbered them, however, and consumed 76% of the total hospital costs.
As for Medicare’s long-term cost trajectory, it is relentlessly upward. The program’s net expenditures totaled $486 billion last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, or 13.5% of all federal expenditures. In March, the CBO projected that Medicare expenditures would grow an average of 5.7% per year through 2022 and equal 16.2% of all federal outlays.
Medicare patients rack up disproportionate costs in the final year of life. In 2009, 6.6% of the people who received hospital care died. Those 1.6 million people accounted for 22.3% of total hospital expenditures, the Journal’s analysis shows.
Unfortunately, despite the Affordable Care Act’s intentions, the issue of end-of-life care and the costs associated with it looms large. One aspect of the healthcare reform regarding planning end-of-life care for Medicare beneficiaries has been labeled as essentially a death panel, and a deputy administrator and director for Medicare admits in the WSJ article that “we’re always going to have patients in the Medicare program that need a disproportionate number of resources.”
Read the full piece at the Wall Street Journal.
Written by Alyssa Gerace
Category: Long Term Care, Medicare and Medicaid, Senior Care, Senior Housing
I'm not quite sure I get the point…isn't Medicare primarily for people 65 and older? Of course costs would primarily be spent on them.
You would expect the costs to be heavily weighted to the elderly; however, it is the "end of life" timeframe that is costing the program the largest percentage of dollars. I believe we will begin to notice the shift in our culture that begins to discuss the new duty to die vs the righ to die. The only way out for those in power will be to push the assisted suicide agenda and simply eliminate the cost. Heck…the evil politicians will probably come up with a tax deduction to your estate for offing yourself and saving the state money. In Switserland and Germany a company called EXIT International is taking up residency in nursing homes and for a fee the elderly can hire them to kill (euthanize) them. The eco-nuts will declare them "useless breathers" and try to convince everyone that riding ourselves of these useless eledery eaters-breathers will save money and the planet. Hopefully, it will not come to this. Would be nice if more children took care of their elderly parents in their own homes…now I am preaching.