Doctor-patient talk could cut costs, ethicists say

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“Both of them could have ended up dying in a hospital having run up bills of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Kellerman, chairman of the department of emergency medicine at Emory University. “Neither of them wanted that, and I fought like hell to keep that from happening.”

As politicians on Capitol Hill debate reforming the health care system, doctors and ethicists say there could easily be tremendous cost savings if doctors and family members had more conversations about end-of-life issues.

A March 2009 study in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggested that more than $76 million per year could be saved if half of the people who die from cancer annually had end-of-life conversations with their doctors. In the authors’ sample, patients who reported having those talks had 36 percent lower health care costs in the final week of life. Read about life expectancy and health care reform