High Health Care Costs Bankrupt One In Four American Seniors

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High Health Care Costs Bankrupt One In Four AmericanSeniorsBy Sy Mukherjee on Feb 1, 2013 at 10:30amAccording to a new study released bythe Journal of General Internal Medicine, out-of-pocket medical spending in thelast five years of life left one in four American seniors bankrupt.The study found thataverage “out-of-pocket expenditures in the 5 years prior to death were $38,688for individuals, and $51,030 for couples in which one spouse dies.” Thataverage was skewed upwards by staggeringly high out-of-pocket medical spendingby seniors who had particularly expensive medical needs. All told, a full “25percent of subjects’ expenditures exceeded baseline total household assets, and43 percent of subjects’ spending surpassed their non-housing assets,” accordingto the report.The study’s findingsunderscore the fact that, despite Medicare coverage — which is more efficient and cost-effective comparedto private insurance — health care consumption by seniors suffering from costlydiseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s can often drive up prices to anunsustainable rate.That represents the simplereality of the costs of treating diseases for which there are still no cures. Seventypercent of national health care expenses derive from just 10 percent ofthe population, usually by terminally ill Americans.But when conservativepoliticians use that figure to justify radical cuts to social safety netprograms, their logic simply doesn’t add up. Shifting ailing patients away frompublicly financed insurance programs and into the private market only drives uphealth care costs and uncompensated care rates by forcing people to pursuetreatment that they cannot afford — and those policies would simply force evenmore seniors to exceed their non-housing assets to pay for their medical costs.The solution to this issue lies in finding more cost-effective treatments forcostly diseases, not leaving seniors to their own devices to figure out how topay for their health care.