This is interesting because the end of life is so expensive for healthcare. Short-sighted?......
Unpaid family and friends provide the overwhelming majority of care to the elderly in their last year of life, according to a new study highlighting the need to expand supportive services to caregivers.
In 2011, 2.3 million caregivers tended to the needs of an estimated 905,000 older Americans in their final year of life, the report in Health Affairs found.
Nearly 9 in 10 of the caregivers were unpaid, and only 9 percent of dying older adults received money for caregiving from government or private insurance.
“Supporting caregivers is an urgent public health issue,” said lead author Dr. Katherine Ornstein, a professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
“We have a huge reliance on families throughout the course of serious illness, but especially at the end of life. It’s the most complex and challenging time, and it’s really the families who are involved,” she said in a phone interview.