Do you have statistics on that? In my experience, the last 3 months usually involve palliative care, hospice and the like, which isn’t all that expensive.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2006-10-18-end-of-life-costs_x.htm
Basically, it varies a lot from place to place. Hospice-oriented care is like 1/3 of the cost, and is probably the “way of the future”, so to speak, but a lot of places do a *lot* of unnecessary care and things as people near end of life. My coworker’s 80 year old mom was dying of brain cancer, for instance, and they did a bunch of operations on her in the last month she was alive. He said the total bills came to like $100,000, whereas all of her care prior to like the last three months was something like $10,000. In a situation like that, should we spend $100,000 of health resources for a hopeless situation like that? She probably would have had a much more pleasant end in hospice than in a hospital all bandaged up, but most people find it hard to think like that in that situation.
mean annual medical expenditures (1996 dollars) for persons aged 65 and older were $37,581 during the last year of life versus $7,365 for nonterminal years.
Last-year-of-life expenses constituted 22 percent of all medical expenditures nationally.
I know it’s not the exact point I made, but it illustrates the issue. Heroic measures to keep people alive for a few extra weeks are cruel, unnecessary and an enormously wasteful practice.