Maggie Mahar reports from Berlin, detailing economist Uwe Reinhardt’s speech on health care costs and the aging population.
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The article offers Sweden as a great example of controling costs, but I read elsewhere last week that the Swedish system is going down the tubes.
The article is only partially correct. Our practice, which includes one retinal specialist, has increased costs by about $1.5 million per year because of drug costs for Lucentis, a drug used to treat wet macular degeneration. This expense did not exist just 2 years ago. Many retinal specialists are using Avastin off-label instead, which is MUCH cheaper but actively discouraged by the drug manufacturer. Macular degeneration is almost exclusively a disease of the elderly. If we all died by age 60, as we did not too but a generation or two ago, macular degeneration would be an infrequent, and less costly, malady. It may be painful to accept, but chronic disease and heroic acute interventions in the elderly, often with very short life expectancy, are a huge portion of health care expenditures.
The following apply to Medicare:
Up to 30 percent of Medicare payments cover the cost of care for people in the last year of life.
40 percent of Medicare dollars cover care for people in the last month.
10 percent of Medicare beneficiaries account for approximately 70 percent of program spending.
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