Medicare Spending

A recent study tries to correct the misconception of Medicare spending. MIT reports:

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 ..., 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. Fewer than 10 percent of people who die in a given year have a predicted one-year mortality rate over 50 percent. As the researchers found, even when people are admitted to a hospital in what turns out to be their last year of life, fewer than 4 percent of those patients have a predicted one-year mortality rate of 80 percent or higher at the time of admission.

So I guess "words mean something".  For decades politicians and policy wonks have spouted the inefficiency of Medicare. In reality if 5% is spent on the last year of life, and if Medicare starts at 65 and life expectancy for a person at 65 is to 82, then the 18 years indicates that 5% is less than the annual allocation. In effect, known last year expenditures are below average.

Between using the right words and the right numbers one comes up with a grossly different answer. The result, one must question everything, especially if from a Government source.