“After 298 days in the hospital and the rehabilitation center you are finally home,” a son reports on LinkedIn about his 71-year-old father. But that also shows that everything has been said. The son tells GP Danka Stuiver in doctors’ magazine Medisch Contact that his formerly vital father spent three months in the ICU, of which ten weeks on a ventilator. After months of rehabilitation, he can now walk short distances with the rollator and an oxygen tank. He is often anxious and has hyperventilation complaints. Good for the 71-year-old and his family that he’s still alive – more or less – but that cost a lot of money.
Stuiver: ‘In healthcare costs roughly estimated to exceed half a million, but especially in the burden on bed and healthcare personnel. How many heart operations, kidney transplants and cancer operations would not have had to be postponed in three months if an IC bed had been free? Maybe forty. This is emphatically not the man’s fault, but the result of long-term impoverishment in the care sector. Above all, it is a result of avoiding and postponing the discussion about what we as a society are willing to pay for the small group of seriously ill Covid patients, even two years after the outbreak of the pandemic.’
Last year, the Gupta report stated that the number of years of life lost due to delayed care was more than ten times is as much as the number of life years gained through covid care. Moreover, while we have set an unofficial limit for the introduction of new medical technology and medicines at 80,000 euros per qaly (life year gained in good health), all qalys go out of the window in the event of corona.’
It is, the doctor says, about time we start talking about what we as a society want to spend on keeping very sick covid patients alive, who will probably never fully recover. And how much other care we want to postpone or adjust for that. Many older covid patients are very expensive. Too expensive?
