Out-of-Pocket Medical Spending and Charon's Obol

McWilliams discusses the implications of a study by Kelley et al in which they used nationally representative survey data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine out-of-pocket household spending on medical care for 3,209 Medicare beneficiaries in the last 5 years of life. Reforming Medicare and financing long-term care to fulfill this promise is thorny business, and the stakes are high for getting it right.