Age-specific patterns of health care expenditure in dying people

Correlation between the increase in healthcare expenditure, concerning all developed countries, and aging is a documented and universally accepted phenomenon. More debated is the cause provoking this situation: attention is often focused on the paradigm affirming that elderly people consume more health resources due to this population generally being more ill. Such assumption, along with demographic forecasts that are seeing world population into a steady aging trend, brings with itself many concerns linked to the future sustainability of today's healthcare systems. However, many authors have hypothesized that the increase in costs is not correlated to aging per se rather to mortality demonstrating that generally, consume per capita increases during the years preceding death and that therefore older population layers would witness an increase in health costs because their mortality rate is higher.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Analyzing expenditure during the period preceding death, those same authors have showed that older people cost less than young ones in this terminal phase. Such theory is assuming much import within scientific and political debate because it re-sizes the weight of aging in future evolutions of health expenditure, sustaining that although life expectancy is rising in the world population we shall simply witness a shifting of those costs towards a later date, and that the costs related to death being minor at an older age, we'd be realizing some sort of saving. Because of this theory, a 65-year-old man in the future will spend less than a 65-year-old man today; the better life expectancy will delay his death, and when he does die, his older age will reduce the costs.