“Hundreds of kids” could be helped with the money the Northern Territory currently spends on the elderly, its health minister John Elferink said, adding humans had “reached the limit of how old we can grow as a species”.
“We pour huge effort and resources into the last year of a person’s life,” he said. “If we are doing that, we are doing that at the expense of some other point in the medical system.”
An elderly person with a terminal illness cost the Northern Territory health system about $1m every year, Elferink told the ABC after the annual Australasian aeromedical conference in Darwin on Thursday.
Children, for example, could benefit more from the funding, Elferink said.
“You could probably touch hundreds of kids with that sort of money,” he said. “The fact is we’ve pretty much reached the limit of how old we can grow as a species.”
An expert in geriatric medicine, associate professor Ruth Hubbard, described the comments as “quite shocking” and misinformed.
“As someone who has dedicated my life to the care of elderly people I have a visceral abhorrence to those ideas he has postulated without any evidence base,” Hubbard said.
“It’s an absolute myth that expenditure on health has increased because of an ageing population. It has increased because of new technology and interventions we’re able to provide now, which are expensive.”
Much of the healthcare directed towards elderly people was to help them maintain a good quality of life so they could continue to contribute, Hubbard said, rather than just keeping them alive as long as possible.
“There’s a lot of inherent ageism in society that we’re trying to root out from the health system,” she said.
“I find it often occurs among old people themselves, who say ‘I don’t deserve this test or treatment’.
“When we explain it’s something we’re offering through a motivation of improving health, and not extending lifespan, then they are more understanding. These treatments are also not necessarily the most expensive, and can help them remain well at home.”
Most healthcare expenditure was a result of caring for someone in the last year of their life, regardless of age, she said, with a 25-year-old dying from metastatic melanoma costing about the same as an 85-year-old dying from heart disease.
The chief executive of the Australian Healthcare & Hospitals Association, Alison Verhoeven, said she did not want to comment on the ethics of Elferink’s comments, but said it was true that elderly people in hospitals put a strain on healthcare budgets.
“We know a large amount of money is spent in hospitals on very elderly people, and while 70% of us say we want to die at home, most end up dying in hospital.
“I think what we need funding for is supporting the elderly to stay well and stay home as long as they can, because almost two thirds of people who could die appropriately at home die in a hospital, and that is a real issue,” she said.
