New Office of Inspector General Report: Hospice Deficiencies Pose Risks to Medicare Beneficiaries

WHY WE DID THIS STUDY  

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) has identified significant vulnerabilities in the Medicare hospice benefit and found that hospices did not always provide needed services to beneficiaries and sometimes provided poor quality care.  Click here to view report.

Dore Memo to US Senate HELP Committee: Vote No on Bill S. 693

By Margaret Dore, Esq., MBA

For a summary sheet including a similar House bill (H.R. 1676), click here. For a pdf version of this memo, click here.

I.  INTRODUCTION

I am an elder law attorney and president of Choice is an Illusion, a nonprofit corporation opposed to assisted suicide and euthanasia.[1] Formed in 2010, Choice is an Illusion fights against assisted suicide and euthanasia throughout the U.S. and in other countries.[2] We also fight against hospice and palliative care abuse.

S. 693, the Palliative Care and Hospice Education & Training Act," amends the existing Public Health Service Act to require financial support for “Palliative Care and Hospice Education Centers.”[3] This is a new program, which will include direct patient care.[4]

Existing federal palliative care programs, such as the Medicare hospice benefit, are plagued by fraud, poor quality care and a gross waste of taxpayer money.[5] S. 693 must be rejected unless problems with existing programs are resolved; Congress must not throw good money after bad. The bill must also be rejected for the reasons set forth below. 

Margaret Dore and Dawn Eskew Take the Lead Against Flawed Hospice Act

Margaret Dore and
Dawn Eskew

The "Palliative Care and Hospice Education and Training Act," bills H.R. 1676 and S. 693, were proposed in 2017 and viewed as noncontroversial. 

In July 2018, H.R. 1676 passed the House. The bill was then received in the Senate and transferred to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which was also considering S. 693.

A week later, the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (OIG) issued a portfolio highly critical of the Medicare hospice benefit. This alerted Dore to some of the bills' problems.

Inspector General Slams Hospice

https://oig.hhs.gov/newsroom/media-materials/2018/hospice/anr-transcript.pdf

(Washington D.C., Tuesday, July 30, 2018) - Hospice use has grown steadily over recent years, with Medicare paying $16.7 billion for 1.4 million beneficiaries in hospice care in 2016. A decade before, in 2006, those numbers were $9.2 billion for fewer than 1 million beneficiaries....

In a new hospice portfolio released by the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (OIG), the agency found that hospices do not always provide needed services to patients and sometimes provide poor quality care.

OIG also found that patients and their families and caregivers do not receive crucial information to make informed decisions about their care. And taxpayers are bankrolling much of this poor care and fraud through the Medicare hospice benefit....