I was watching Frontline this evening on PBS and they spent a good deal of time going over our budget, or lack there of. One thing they spent a great deal of time on (Because it's eventually what will bankrupt us) is healthcare costs. They had a very interesting statistic in there, and I wonder if anyone has any insight into how in the hell his can be true. The exact numbers I'm recalling here are nothing I wrote down, so I'm going to be slightly off, but not much. The last 4 months of our life is when the government will spend the vast majority of the money it will ever spend on us with medicare, over 1/4 of it. They looked at the costs of the last four months of life at two very good, top of the line major healthcare providers, UCLA and Mayo-Rochester. At Mayo Clinic the last four months of your life is going to cost medicare about $25,000, at UCLA it was like twice as much! Not only that, Mayo Ranks higher on all of the quality of care scores and whatnot. How in the hell can there be such a HUGE difference? I'm assuming a huge part of it has to be the state regulations and sytstems in place for healthcare in both places..and I'd expect California to be more expensive then Rochester because it's just more expensive..but not this much! What the hell gives here?
I think I might be watching too much TV since the last two threads I've started have been about television shows.