Being Mortal

The soaring cost of health care has become the greatest threat to the long-term solvency of most advanced nations, and the incurable account for a lot of it. In the United States, 25 percent of all Medicare spending is for the 5 percent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months that is of little apparent benefit. The United States is often thought to be unusual in this regard, but it doesn’t appear to be. Data from elsewhere are more limited, but where they are available—for instance, from countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland—the results are similar. Spending on a disease like cancer tends to follow a particular pattern. There are high initial costs as the cancer is treated, and then, if all goes well, these costs taper off. A 2011 study, for instance, found that medical spending for a breast cancer patient in the first year of diagnosis averaged an estimated $ 28,000, the vast majority of it for the initial diagnostic testing, surgery, and, where necessary, radiation and chemotherapy. Costs fell after that to about $ 2,000 a year. For a patient whose cancer proves fatal, though, the cost curve is U-shaped, rising toward the end—to an average of $ 94,000 during the last year of life with a metastatic breast cancer. Our medical system is excellent at trying to stave off death with $ 12,000-a-month chemotherapy, $ 4,000-a-day intensive care, $ 7,000-an-hour surgery. But, ultimately, death comes, and few are good at knowing when to stop.