Cranking down the intensity of care at age 75

[HFWR]

...a drawn out and miserable [-]end of[/-] life...

For a minute there I thought you were talking about w*rk...

 

[harley]

So, which group of people die a lingering costly death vs. a nice, quick, and cheap death? The "healthy" people or the unkempt? Does anybody have some statistics?

I recall that my former boss used to say that cigarette smokers did not cost much for healthcare, because lung cancer killed fairly quickly (no, he was not a smoker, and lived to the 80s). I don't know if he was right or not.

It's hard to know, when the articles contain stupid sentences like "All the cheeseburgers, cigarettes and channel-surfing Americans enjoy certainly take their toll: Unhealthy lifestyles account for up to 40% of all deaths in the U.S." I guess that means healthy lifestyles account for the other 60% of deaths. Ack!

I don't know if it's the final word or anything, but this was an interesting article in Forbes - Alcohol, Obesity and Smoking Do Not Cost Health Care Systems Money. If you follow the links in the article you can see some of the actual science. I tend to believe it's true, but not so sincerely I couldn't be convinced to change my mind with better facts.

 

[NW-Bound]

Wow! That article in Forbes points to another article here, which says:

In 2008 the Dutch government looked into the cost of treating people from the age of 20 to death. They had three categories, the healthy, obese and smokers. The results were not what the health gurus were looking for, the paper says:

“Until age 56 annual health expenditure was highest for obese people. At older ages, smokers incurred higher costs. Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers. Obese individuals held an intermediate position. Alternative values of epidemiologic parameters and cost definitions did not alter these conclusions.”

The lifetime costs were in Euros:

Healthy: 281,000
Obese: 250,000
Smokers: 220,000​

​

Then, it occurs to me that the above numbers are just medical costs. The healthy cost society even more in the form of longer SS that they draw. Darn!


PS. By the way, this is another data point showing that the hope of healthy people to die quickly and cleanly is not supported by statistics. If you are healthy, it's gonna take a long time to die and that makes sense. What a thing to look forward to!