Feds to Hospice Patients: Die Faster, Please

http://www.talkleft.com/story/2007/11/27/01730/226

Feds to Hospice Patients: Die Faster, Please
By Jeralyn, Section Social Justice
Posted on Mon Nov 26, 2007 at 11:17:30 PM EST



The Government is going after hospices to repay Medicare when their patients don't die fast enough.

The result: Many hospices will go broke and have to close.

A perverse interim measure: Some hospices are trolling nursing homes looking for more patients. That way they can use the new money to pay Medicare back for the old patients who didn't die fast enough.

{Ms. Youngstown, a} Hometown Hospice nurse, said that after she visited her charges — doling out their pills, and turning the sweet potatoes in their ovens — she trolled for new patients at nursing homes and senior centers.

At the small hospital here, she said, the nurses joke about her “marketing” forays: “They’ll say, ‘Here comes Nurse Kevorkian. She has no shame.’ And I’ll say, ‘Look, I have to have a paycheck, too.’”

Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

Related link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/us/27hospice.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=us&oref=slogin

Love those Compassionate Conservatives!

Funny way to say it "doesn't die fast enough".

Many people run out of insurance benefits for all kinds of illnesses. Not a good way to run a healthcare system, but it is the one with which we are stuck.

this is it. People die in their own damn good time. My mother lived eight months after she turned down dialysis (Get the hell out of here!) and so did Art Buchwald. Unless they want to start executing dying patients who pass that six month mark, they'd better rethink their priorities.

Hospice care is cheaper and more humane than having old people spend their last days taking up space and being tortured to death in intensive care units. I guess it's not sucking enough taxpayer money in to suit Humana and HCA.

Medicare wants to save money? How about re-visiting the Medicare drug bill and allowing negotiation to reduce the costs of the drugs?