The New York Times
April 18, 2012
Always alert for a bit of good news about the sorry way so many older Americans die, I noticed a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency’s statisticians looked at the deaths of people over 85 — 700,000 of them in 2007 — and where they occurred, and pointed out some encouraging trends.
The proportion of those very old people who died as hospital patients dropped to 29 percent in 2007 from 40 percent in 1989. During the same time period, the proportion who died at home climbed to 19 percent from 12 percent.
Read the full article in The New York Times
