Perhaps the largest study of regional variations looked at end-of-life hospital care for 5 million Medicare patients across 3,400 U.S. hospital regions. We might hope to see that patients live longer when local hospitals decide to keep them in the intensive care unit (ICU) for longer periods of time, relative to patients in hospitals that kick them out sooner. What the study found, however, was the opposite. For each extra day in the ICU, patients were estimated to live roughly 40 fewer days.18 The same study also estimated that spending an additional $1,000 on a patient resulted in somewhere
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I suspect he finding depends heavily on how good confounding control was. More time in the ICU proobably cauused in part by health status pre admission.
