New research on Medicare spending shows unexplained variations in the amount, intensity and cost of care provided to Medicare patients at the nation’s top academic medical centers in their last two years of life.

The research follows rising in health care costs and a report by Medicare’s trustees that the program’s hospital fund will go broke in 11 years.

Researchers at Darmouth Medical School used data on 192,242 Medicare patients treated at teaching hospitals who died between 2001 and 2005, comparing the length of hospitalization, the number of doctors treating them and the time they spent in intensive care units during the last two years of their lives.

The researchers found huge differences in Medicare spending among hospitals, raising the possibility that the government could save large amounts of money. For example, total Medicare spending ranges from an average of $93,842 for patients who receive most of their care at UCLA Medical Center to $53,432 at the Mayo Clinic’s main teaching hospital in Rochester, Minn.

Also, medical spending averaged $85,729 for those who used Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, $78,666 at Massachusetts General and $55,333 at the Cleveland Clinic.

Differences in the last six months of life were even higher with spending an average of $52,911 for UCLA patients and $28,763 for those who used the Mayo hospital, St. Mary's.

According to Dr. John E. Wennberg of Dartmouth Medical School, the chief author of the study, doctors and hospitals that provided more care, or more intensive care, did not necessarily achieve better results for patients.

“Some chronically ill and dying Americans are receiving too much care – more than they and their families actually want or benefit from. Contrary to popular assumptions, it’s the volume of services, not the price per service that accounts for most of the variation in Medicare spending,” Dr. Wennberg said, according to the New York Times.

“We know that hospitals are dangerous places if you don’t need to be there,” Dr. Eliot Fisher, who also led the study, said.

The study also found that the patients at UCLA Medical Center spent 11.6 days in the intensive care unit on average versus 4.2 days at the Mayo Clinic’s hospital. A patient at UCLA was visited by a doctor nearly 53 times, versus 24 physicians visits at the Mayo Clinic.

All these findings led the study’s authors to believe that Medicare could save large amounts of money if patients were treated the same in all hospitals.

Medicare spending for the population in the study totaled about $289 billion. If the spending per patient for the entire population mirrored the rates in Rochester, Medicare could have saved $50 billion.