"What we discovered is, very little [Medicare] money is spent on people who we know with high probability are going to die in a short amount of time," says Amy Finkelstein, a in MIT’s Department of Economics and co-author of a paper .
Around 25 percent of Medicare spending in the U.S. occurs in the last year of people's lives. This is sometimes discussed as a questionable use of resources: Is society throwing large amounts of medical treatment at some patients in a futile, if noble, effort to extend lives that are bound to end soon? A new study co-authored by an MIT health care economist offers a resounding answer: No. After examining millions of medical records, the study found that although Medicare spending is concentrated among people who die, there is very little Medicare spending on patients whose death within the year is highly likely. For example, the researchers discovered, less than 5 percent of Medicare spending is applied to the single highest-risk percentile of all individuals - and their predicted one-year mortality rate is still just 46 percent. "What we discovered is, very little money is spent on people who we know with high probability are going to die in a short amount of time," says Amy Finkelstein, a professor in MIT's Department of Economics and co-author of a paper in the journal Science that details the study's findings. To the extent that such cases exist, she adds, "they're just not the drivers of spending" in bulk. The study also illuminates the general circumstances of late-in-life mortality.
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