Improving the Match between Patients’ Needs & End-of-Life Care by Increasing Patient Choice in Medicare

Abstract

One way to achieve health equity—ensuring everyone has fair and just opportunities to be as healthy as possible—in the United States would be to reallocate Medicare spending from low-value medical care (expensive treatments that do little good) toward high-value medical and social care (respectively medical interventions that have been shown to work well but are not covered by Medicare and nonmedical interventions, such as help with activities of daily living, that patients find more helpful than low-value care). In the current policy milieu, the most practical, direct step in that direction may be for Medicare—an already established, universal health care program for the elderly—to provide patients with more choices and autonomy.