“How Hospice Became a For-Profit Hustle”
It began as a visionary notion—that patients could die with dignity at home. Now it’s a twenty-two-billion-dollar industry plagued by exploitation.
By Ava Kofman
November 28, 2022
The New Yorker, Dec 6, 2022 issue.
It might explain a bit on why we have such varying experience these days with hospice.
If you live in a rural area with few health workers, you can't pick and choose. We only have the one option here. If we move an hour away we will have a different hospice provider, but no options to choose. Then, there's insurance in network system to consider and physician referral process that can narrow the choices. And as mentioned above, often when hospice is needed you are in a grief/mourning state so you follow directions more readily than when visiting a car dealership.
Plus why would any sane person have a reason to suspect that a service like hospice could be run by unscrupulous people, or that they may be harmed rather than helped by their choice? Telling people to do their research feels to me like victim blaming.
Please be just as responsible when selecting a hospice provider for your loved ones. Do proper research before choosing.
It’s the same with everything. It would be wonderful if all doctors were knowledgeable, compassionate and provided excellent care. Sadly, this isn’t always the case.
We are fortunate to have modern technology and fabulous doctors but we still have to do our own research to find the most suitable doctor for our needs. We must research hospice providers prior to using them.
We were very satisfied with our hospice teams for my brother and my mother. Many people are thoroughly satisfied but it would be foolish to think that anything across the board is perfect.
Please remember that you can always stop a particular hospice organization if you are dissatisfied and use another one at any given time.
We were very pleased with mom’s nurse in hospice. She let us know that she was going to work with another hospice organization.
She told us that we could follow her by joining the other hospice organization. We researched their organization and decided to switch to keep mom’s nurse.
This nurse worked with mom until her death. Mom loved her. She was incredibly compassionate with mom and our entire family. I will always be grateful to her for her caring service.
The long, contentious thread about how "hospice killed my loved one" seemed to be filled with delusional sounding claims that made it easy to dismiss any negative experiences as more of the same. Then over time I started to see a pattern of people who willingly signed on for the "free extra help" provided by American style hospice providers without any understanding of the terminal diagnosis required.... in fact many, many people advise that a terminal diagnosis isn't necessary at all. And then there were alarming stories about inappropriate use of the medication tool kit. Yes, there are still people who are deep in denial who can't come to terms with their loved one's mortality, but there are others that need to be listened to and not immediately mocked and derided.
ETA: we had an excellent experience with the nonprofit hospice we used for my father’s end of life care recently.