The longer patients live in hospice care, the more money the facility loses:
Over the last eight years, the refusal of patients to die according to actuarial schedules has led the federal government to demand that hospices exceeding reimbursement limits repay hundreds of millions of dollars to Medicare.
Related posts:
- Medicare now requires physician essays for hospice care, as if pre-authorizations weren’t bad enough
- Hospice faces tough times
- Are patients who enter hospice care really abandoned by their primary care doctors?
- A false positive leads to bankruptcy
- When hospice care comes too late
- A prostitute for a disabled man in hospice care
- The government has already proven itself
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Not so bad as the excerpt suggests. While no one wants to see a medical business model benefit from a patient’s timely (or even early) demise, the hospice’s here are the victims of their own mission creep. They admit that they have begun providing hospice care for alzheimer’s and dementia. These conditions do require great amounts of nursing care, but fall outside the scope of hospice. They expanded their business into these areas because it seemed to make economic sense; only the government as payor thought otherwise in retrospect.
Hospice guy at Hospiceblog has been covering this issue with some heated discussions in the comments sections. More in depth then the NYT article. Not as simple as the article puts it out to be.
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