My 92-Year-Old Father Didn’t Need More Medical Care

January 3, 2020

(The Atlantic) – Many Americans are puzzled about why end-of-life care costs are so high, and why physicians cannot seem to reduce them. My father’s story is the answer. It has less to do with physicians’ and hospitals’ financial incentives to admit more patients and perform more medical interventions, and more to do with the effort required to order and provide human care. For providers, ordering tests and consultations and prescribing antibiotics is easier than listening to and diagnosing the particular needs of the person in front of them. It is easier for the medical system to marshal all sorts of costly interventions—MRI scans, hospital admissions, neurosurgeons, cancer chemotherapy, and the rest—but harder, if not impossible, to accept the inevitable and provide symptom management, grief counseling, and home care to patients and their family.