Thank you for dying (and lowering the federal budget)

 It's not just those bioethicists who are pointing out that if you kill the sick it saves money.

Apparently a lot of old folks with chronic illness died of covid, so surprise surprise they won't have to spend so much on Medicare.

The origina NYTimes article  is behind a paywall, but theFiscal Times site discusses it.

they start by saying it was those budgetary cuts to hospitals etc from Medicare

Something strange has been happening with Medicare, The New York Times reports: “Instead of growing and growing, as it always had before, spending per Medicare beneficiary has nearly leveled off over more than a decade.” If Medicare’s spending per beneficiary had continued along the trajectory it had been on two decades ago, the program’s spending from 2011 until now would be some $3.9 trillion higher and deficits would have been more than a quarter larger, according to an analysis by The Upshot, part of the Times site.

“Without a doubt, this is the most important thing that has happened to the federal budget in the last 20 years,” David Cutler, a professor of health policy and medicine at Harvard, told the Times. Cutler helped the Obama White House develop the Affordable Care Act, which appears to be one reason for the shifting trendline.

The Trend downward started in 2010...

But AnnAlthouse's blog notes something else in the NYTimes article:

"Medicare may even wind up saving money because of Covid-19 — because the older Americans who died from the disease tended to have other illnesses that would have been expensive to treat if they had survived...."

that graph is not total spending but per capita spending.

one comment noted that 2010 was the start of Obamacare, but would this impact Medicare?

another commenter noted:

Yahoo Finance article from August 2021: COVID-19 didn't hurt Social Security or Medicare as much as experts feared, report finds Money quote from the article: "On the other side, a senior administration official described increased deaths from the pandemic as helping the program's bottom line. It had a "small effect in the other direction" compared to the drop in revenue from fewer workers paying into the system. The sad result of the hundreds of thousands of additional deaths meant that fewer older Americans were available to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits."

another comment noted the decision to put covid patients into nursing homes might have had something to do with this, as do DNR orders/living wills

economics is not my strong point but I might point out that the budget cuts stopped a lot of defensive mediicne and excess testing so we didn't get sued.

But I have been living in the Philippines for 18 years so am not up to date with all this.