Who Cares if The Patients Die?
- From: Raymond <Bluerhymer@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2012 18:34:07 -0700 (PDT)
More Gangsters in Health Care Abuse of Power.
Health Care Renewal
If we really want better health care, we will have to change policies,
practices, and laws so that leaders of health care organizations are
motivated more by the desire to ...help patients than by the desire to
become rich. The phenomenon of hospices enrolling inappropriate
patients just to enhance revenue could be more widespread than
previously appreciated
Addressing threats to health care's core values, especially those
stemming from concentration and abuse of power. Advocating for
accountability, integrity, transparency, honesty and ethics in
leadership and governance of health care.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Who Cares if The Patients Die? - Apparently Not Some Hospice
Marketers
An article in USA Today suggests that marketers for hospices are
pushing even more aggressive measures to recruit patients, regardless
of the consequences.
Marketing Hospice to Prevent Re-Admission
Per USA Today,
Hospice marketers, exploring possibilities for new revenue to help
continue the industry's remarkable growth, are looking to exploit a
provision in the 2010 health care law by persuading hospitals to send
Medicare patients into end-of-life hospice care instead of readmitting
them to the hospital.
Such a move, the hospice marketers say, will enable hospitals to avoid
paying the Medicare penalties required by the new law when hospitals
discharge patients and then have to readmit them within 30 days:
Instead of readmitting the patients, hospitals should send them to
hospice care, which also is covered by Medicare, according to a USA
TODAY analysis of marketing materials.
Patients with severe heart problems and pneumonia tend to decline
quickly and often move in and out of hospitals, said hospice marketing
specialist Rich Chesney, who proposed the idea.
It might be better, Chesney said, if a hospital CEO hired people to
talk to family members about hospice, instead of a doctor, who is more
focused on not losing a patient. Chesney made his proposal recently at
a conference sponsored by the National Hospice and Palliative Care
Organization, an industry trade group. [Chesney is apparently the
President of Healthcare Market Resources, whose slogan is "growing
bottom lines with information." - Ed]
'If (hospices) make that part of their business and their revenue
stream, that's sound business,' said Stan Massey, chief marketing
officer for Transcend Hospice Marketing in Holland, Ohio. Massey
recently wrote a blog recommending hospice marketers talk to hospital
CEOs instead of the doctors who usually decide who is eligible for
hospice care. Those conversations, he wrote, 'must be framed heavily
in terms of financial benefit.'
Ignoring the Hospice Mission
Lost in the marketers' thinking seems to be any notion of the hospice
mission. Hospices are supposed to provide compassionate palliative
care to patients at the end of life who do not want any further
aggressive intervention. Good hospice care is likely to make the last
days of such patients more tolerable.
However, generally hospices intentionally do not provide any care
beyond palliation, such as, for example, antibiotics for acute
infections, transfusions in the case of acute blood loss, or surgery
for acute trauma. Should a patient who is not at the end of life be
erroneously admitted to hospice, and then suffer some new acute
problem, that patient is at risk of bad outcomes, including death
because of denial of the sort of care available in acute care
settings. Thus, admitting patients to hospice who are not at the end
of life or have not given truly informed consent for hospice care may
lead to patients dying prematurely, or suffering suffering preventable
complications of treatable diseases and injuries.
Aggressive marketing of hospice, particularly pushing hospice for
patients just because they seem likely to be re-admitted to a
hospital, especially by having marketers try to go around patients'
own physicians, risks admitting patients to hospice who should not be
in hospice. Thus such aggressive hospice marketing may lead to
needless, and wrongful deaths of, injuries to, and morbidity for
patients who should have received more aggressive treatment.
The USA Today article did note:
Health care analysts and ethicists, however, say such proposals are
contrary to the intent of the health care law, which is to provide
better care, not to put more patients into hospice care for which they
are not ready.
The proposals warp the 'whole idea behind hospice,' said Josh Perry, a
business and ethics professor at Indiana University.
In addition,
Good hospices have been working with hospital CEOs for years, said
Carolyn Cassin, president of the National Hospice Work Group, a
coalition of the 25 largest not-for-profit hospice organizations. But
the goal, she said, was to make sure patients received the care they
needed. She said she was surprised to hear it characterized as a
marketing approach to cut costs.
While hospice care costs less than hospital care, at $151 a day for
Medicare patients, it's meant for people who are going to die. In
hospice care, patients agree not to seek care to improve their health,
such as more surgeries, hospitalizations or chemotherapy. After a
doctor certifies that he expects a person to die within six months,
Medicare covers hospice care.
Experts say they fear patients will be sent to hospice before their
time and miss the proper care that could restore their health.
Penalties, Perry said, are a 'good thing' to hold hospitals
accountable. 'This isn't about extending hospice.'
Summary
We have previously discussed, most recently here, allegations that
specific for-profit hospice corporations were admitting patients who
were not at the end of life just to make more money. The current USA
Today article suggests that the phenomenon of hospices enrolling
inappropriate patients just to enhance revenue could be more
widespread than previously appreciated. The more often hospices enroll
patients who are not at the end of life, and/or have not given true
informed consent for hospice care, the more patients are likely to
suffer needless and wrongful morbidity and injuries, and the more
patients are likely to needlessly, and wrongfully die prematurely.
It seems to me that unexpected morbidity of, injuries to, or premature
death of hospice patients who were not obviously already at the end of
life could lead to civil litigation, and even criminal investigation.
Furthermore, the realization that hospices, once considered the most
humane of health care institutions, are more frequently run for
profit, and may put profit ahead of their mission should provoke re-
examination of our haste to encourage more and more patient care to be
given by for-profit organizations in an era of "greed is good."
If we really want better health care, we will have to change policies,
practices, and laws so that leaders of health care organizations are
motivated more by the desire to help patients than by the desire to
become rich.
Posted by Roy M. Poses MD at 11:39 AM
http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/05/who-cares-if-patients-die-apparently.html
Why Hospice Organizations DON'T Want You to Know the Truth!
The Hospice Industry is a white-collar criminal's dream environment,
Hospice states, "We don't do weekends!" Whether in a hospital, nursing
home or hospice, you are expected to die as SAP
Reporting Fraud at Your Hospice - Protect the public ... HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVES ON THE INSTITUTIONAL CARE OF THE DYING.
Utilitarian health care corporations have no shame and they do not
value human life. The business of utilitarian health care
corporations is not "caring;" it is profiting. Yet such corporations
always profess to care most about their patients, offering sugary
sweet advertisements about the superior qualities of their services
Wake up dummies ! The utilitarian vision empowers the judge-health
care practitioner ("HCP") with absolute executorial power, basically
setting up each HCP as potential judge, jury and executioner with the
power to terminate the lives of any person whose "quality of life" is
inadequate, according to the subjective evaluation of the HCP or,
whose continuing life would cost more than the health care system
wishes to pay. The "executorial power" of the HCP-judge does not
imply "administration" as in "executive branch of government;" rather,
it implies power to literally execute or cause the death of the
patient.
"Lynching the Elderly and Disabled?"
(Why We Need An Elder Justice Act)
http://www.hospicepatients.org/lynching-the-elderly-and-disabled.html
http://www.hospicepatients.org/whyhosporgsdontwanttruth.html
Almost everybody is familiar with stories about the neglect, abuse and
wrongful deaths of our elderly, disabled or mentally impaired. How
many ways can we exploit them? Billing them (or Medicare, Medicaid,
or other insurance) for services which are not rendered,
misappropriating their tax payments into the U.S. treasury for funds
used to reimburse the industry through Medicare and Medicaid,
convincing them they have the "right to die" and are better off dead?
Placing them in facilities that choose not to hire adequate staff
while pocketing revenue designated for staff salaries and hiring.
"In Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the
general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and
our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the
United States of America".
Bullshit ! We Need An Elder Justice Act
.
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