California Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer Blog
A Booming Hospice Industry in America
Did you know that about half of all Medicare patients who die “will do so as a hospice patient”? According to a recent article in the Huffington Post, just ten years ago only about 25 percent of all Medicare patients died in hospice care. Now, in the mid-2010s, that number has doubled. And it affects Medicare spending, too. Indeed, in 2014, Medicare is likely to spend about $15 billion on hospice care alone, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. That number has risen dramatically from the year 2000, when that cost was under $4 billion annually.
Yet, despite the fact that hospice care costs billions of dollars each year, the government doesn’t put an equivalent effort into hospice regulation, according to the article. To be sure, a recent investigation discovered that “the average hospice hasn’t been certified—meaning fully inspected—in 3 ½ years.” And some American hospice facilities, 759 to be exact, haven’t received certifications “in more than six years.” Keep in mind that, under federal law, nursing homes must be inspected much more frequently—every 15 months—and incidents of nursing home abuse and neglect occur nonetheless. What does this mean for the well-being of patients in hospices that haven’t been inspected recently?
First, it’s important to have a clear idea about why hospices are bringing in relatively healthy older adults, and how these companies are profiting from non-terminal patients. How did this start to happen? In short, many hospice care centers have begun recruiting patients with aggressive marketing tactics, and many of those patients aren’t terminal. It’s in the financial interest of a hospice chain to “find patients well before death,” the Washington Post reported. And the reason is simple: “Medicare pays a hospice about $150 a day per patient for routine care, regardless of whether the company sends a nurse or any other worker out that day. That means healthier patients, who generally need less help and live longer, yield more profits.”
When we think about transitioning an elderly loved one into a nursing home or an assisted-living facility, we expect that the facility will provide care and won’t engage in acts of nursing home abuse or neglect. However, 
It’s no secret that 
