say for the sake of argument that such cases could be identified, and spending in this area could be reduced by half. If attainable, cuts of this size would be $70 billion in annual savings, which is certainly a substantial sum. But to keep it in perspective, total U.S. health care spending is in the neighborhood of $2.6 trillion. Thus, the potential gains from even fairly aggressive limits on end-of-life health care spending through Medicare is a little under 3% of total U.S. healthcare spending.
Read the whole post. Many people think that the share of health care spending in the last year of life is high and rising. In fact, it is fairly stable at about 7 percent of total health care spending (note that Taylor’s figures only include Medicare spending, not Medicaid or private spending).
Since Medicare represented 21% of total health spending, was $554 billion. The $76 billion spent on end of life is therefore is fourteen percent of total Medicare spending. This is, in my opinion, substantial.