When Fatal Illness Strikes, Can We Put a Price on Hope?

Healthcare is expensive, but why do we as human beings continue to spend money on medical treatments when the outcome is inevitable?

In The Cost of Hope, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Amanda Bennett retraces her husband’s seven-year battle with cancer, a battle he lost, and takes a hard look at the costs behind it.

Bennett recently presented at the TED conference on healthcare, “TEDMED 2013.”

“I believed I could keep him from dying,” Bennett says in her talk. Experts would say she was in denial. “‘Denial’ isn’t even close to a  strong enough word to describe what those of us facing the death of our loved ones go through,” she says. She prefers the word “hope.”

TED limits its speakers to less than 15 minutes, so Bennett did not have time to delve into what her book found, namely the cost of that hope, which in her husband’s case was nearly $700,000, most of which was paid by insurance.

The challenge, Bennett says in her talk, is that doctors and patients conspire to tell a heroic story, the dramatic fight against illness. ”We have a noble path to curing the disease … but there doesn’t seem to be a noble path to dying,” Bennett says. “Dying is seen as failing.” Perhaps it is time to construct a new story.

You can read our interview with Bennett here.