Hello fans, thanks for making this blog one of the top blogs on the net, If only in my mind or maybe in my childrens minds, The most visited it is not. I am posting a short essay from one of the best. I don't have his permission so I hope he doen't mind too much...

The Cost of Dying Wednesday, November 01, 2006
The cost of dying in Miami, according to a new study, is $23,000. That money is spent over a six-month period - the last six months. It pays for an average of 46 doctor visits and six days in the ICU. (And there is a 27 percent chance you'll die in the ICU.)It's better in Portland, Oregon, where the cost is only $14,000. It's less expensive in Oregon, because there are fewer trips to the doctor (only 18 compared to 46) and an average of one day in the ICU. Chances of dying in the ICU in Oregon are less too - at 13 percent, less than half what they are in Miami.The question, as Julie Appleby writing in USA Today points out, is how much if any of those extra expenses resulted in better medical care. Did they improve the quality of life during treatment? Did they extend life? And if so, did those extra days have any quality?The study - the Dartmouth Atlas Project (a program at Dartmouth Medical School) - didn't get answers to those questions.But when we are planning our own care in old age or taking care of our aging parents, they are questions that must be asked and answered.I don't have the numbers in reach, but I remember reading that some very large percentage of the money Americans spend on health care is spent for care that takes place in the final two years of life. Judging from the Dartmouth study and from what I've seen personally, most of that money is spent on all the wrong things: wasteful visits to family doctors who offer no help and expensive visits to specialists who charge more money for very expensive, very noxious clinical procedures that reduce the quality of life but seldom extend it.We don't need lots of data to convince us of what we know from experience - that all that expensive chemical and surgical intervention at the end of life improves only the lives of those collecting the bills, not those paying them.Another interesting bit of data I read somewhere: If you remove infant mortality from the equation, what is the average difference between the lifespan of someone from Burkina Faso (a desperately poor landlocked country in western Africa) and someone from the United States?Would you be surprised to learn it is only one year?When you get sick in Burkina Faso, you may see a local doctor or witch doctor who will give you some natural herbs. Then you spend your final year surrounded by family and loved ones. The entire cost of medical care during that critical last year of life is almost certainly less than $100.So, apart from infant mortality, the huge cost of Western medicine is providing only a single year of additional life ... and that year is one spent miserably, shuffling between doctors' offices, hospitals, and clinics. Instead of dying with dignity, as people can still do in the world's poorest countries.
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posted by M. Masterson @ 9:50 AM,