Story targets hospices for arthritis admissions
An article in the Oct. 9, 1997, Wall Street Journal took aim at America’s hospices for admitting patients with arthritis, for receiving "as much as $500 a day per patient," and for generating "a firestorm of protest" based on appeals to emotion, when the government tried to tighten eligibility for hospice care. "Fearful of being portrayed as cold-hearted, regulators retreated from their attempt to police the use of hospice services, and Congress hasn’t taken it up," stated staff reporters George Anders and Eva M. Rodriguez.
This article, "Never mind the fraud; what ails Medicare is often perfectly legal," appeared the same day that the House Ways and Means Committee Health Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Bill Thomas (D-CA), held hearings on Medicare waste and fraud. The Journal article highlighted alleged abuses of Medicare by teaching hospitals, hospital-based home health agencies, and skilled nursing facilities and also used hospice to underscore its highly partisan attacks on Medicare.
In response to the article, hospice administrators should remember the following:
• There have only been two documented cases of "hospice stays for arthritis," both in Puerto Rico, in an industry serving 450,000 patients a year. And payments of $500 a day are only for medically necessary inpatient hospice care, less than 10% of total days on the Medicare hospice benefit.
• The firestorm of controversy was in response to subjective second-guessing of hospice admission decisions by auditors for the Office of Inspector General for the small minority of long-stay hospice patients some of whom have already died.
• Congress has already tightened hospice regulations in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act.
In a letter to the Journal, unpublished as this newsletter was going to press, National Hospice Organization President John J. Mahoney asserted that this article "includes facts about hospice care which, at best, lack sufficient context and, at worst, are simply wrong. The article would also have readers believe that protests from the hospice community to such irresponsible journalism would simply be a calculated play on the sympathies of those not wanting to appear cold hearted toward the dying. . . . Anders and Rodriguez use hospices to help indict Medicare as a system rife with largesse’ and generating costs vastly beyond what officials expected.’ Clearly, in the case of hospice care they are simply wrong."
Story targets hospices for arthritis admissions
An article in the Oct. 9, 1997, Wall Street Journal took aim at America’s hospices for admitting patients with arthritis, for receiving "as much as $500 a day per patient," and for generating "a firestorm of protest" based on appeals to emotion, when the government tried to tighten eligibility for hospice care. "Fearful of being portrayed as cold-hearted, regulators retreated from their attempt to police the use of hospice services, and Congress hasn’t taken it up," stated staff reporters George Anders and Eva M. Rodriguez.
This article, "Never mind the fraud; what ails Medicare is often perfectly legal," appeared the same day that the House Ways and Means Committee Health Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Bill Thomas (D-CA), held hearings on Medicare waste and fraud. The Journal article highlighted alleged abuses of Medicare by teaching hospitals, hospital-based home health agencies, and skilled nursing facilities and also used hospice to underscore its highly partisan attacks on Medicare.
In response to the article, hospice administrators should remember the following:
• There have only been two documented cases of "hospice stays for arthritis," both in Puerto Rico, in an industry serving 450,000 patients a year. And payments of $500 a day are only for medically necessary inpatient hospice care, less than 10% of total days on the Medicare hospice benefit.
• The firestorm of controversy was in response to subjective second-guessing of hospice admission decisions by auditors for the Office of Inspector General for the small minority of long-stay hospice patients some of whom have already died.
• Congress has already tightened hospice regulations in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act.
In a letter to the Journal, unpublished as this newsletter was going to press, National Hospice Organization President John J. Mahoney asserted that this article "includes facts about hospice care which, at best, lack sufficient context and, at worst, are simply wrong. The article would also have readers believe that protests from the hospice community to such irresponsible journalism would simply be a calculated play on the sympathies of those not wanting to appear cold hearted toward the dying. . . . Anders and Rodriguez use hospices to help indict Medicare as a system rife with largesse’ and generating costs vastly beyond what officials expected.’ Clearly, in the case of hospice care they are simply wrong."
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