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You are watching multi-source health analysis from Newsy. 

 

BY AUSTIN FAX


Cost-benefit analysis-- Something commonplace in the business world could be coming to a hospital near you. TIME Magazine’s Meredith Melnick tells us what Harvard researchers found when looking at end of life treatment for Medicare patients.


“Of the 1.8 million Medicare patients over age 65 who died in 2008, researchers found that a third had undergone surgery in the year before death and that 18% of those surgeries had occurred in the month before death. Nearly 1 in 10 had surgery in their final week.”
 

A writer for the State Column says this means one obvious thing: more spending.


“[P]hysicians tend to want to exhaust all medical procedures before having a discussion with the patient about their last few days or weeks of life. This drive to push medical procedures that may not be that necessary or beneficial, actually end up driving up the overall Medicare spending.”



And with Washington’s focus on spending cuts-- The Christian Post’s Joseph Perkins uses the study to look into his crystal ball.   


“The finding renews the moral and ethical debate as to whether patients at or near the end of their lives should be discouraged from often-costly medical procedures... the time may be coming when the federal government decides that end-of-life patients,are no longer eligible for Medicare-funded surgery.”



But hold on. In an interview with Fox Business Channel-- Dr. Toby Cosgrove from the Cleveland Clinic thinks we shouldn’t jump to that conclusion so quickly.


COSGROVE: “I don’t think we can use this study for that. I think what you have to realize is that it is not always easy to tell when people are going to die. That don’t have an expired date.”



Finally, The New York Times’s Gina Kolata thinks we can learn from the study-- but results should be taken with a grain of salt.


“By looking only at people who died, researchers can get a skewed picture of what is taking place, critics say. Researchers said their study — done from public records and with no financing — probably pointed to a real problem in American medicine: surgery, which can be painful, expensive and debilitating, is tempting for doctors and patients alike.”