Southern 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?