hospice lobby efforts make news

Found this Associated Press article in the San Jose Mercury News. I’m assuming you could find it in many newspapers across the nation.

The story was written before the house passed their version of the “Stimulus Package”. Since then the bill has passed, and it is my understanding that the one year delay on the rate cut was a part of the bill they passed. I’ll stay away from politics here and just report the news. I have not heard anything about the Senate considering this provision. Not sure where that will leave us in the end. We’ll see what happens next.

For quite some time the hospice industry had this “white hat” appeal. We were the good guys who loved and cared for dying people. Sure, we got paid by Medicare, but we weren’t really part of all that ugly stuff. Fraud, the cap issue, and abuse of the system have done a good job of knocking the white hat off of our heads. Stories like this will finish that job. Not sure it’s a bad thing that the hospice industry is acting like the rest of the healthcare industry, but it isn’t who we were in the past.