(Snippets from the frontline)
The scoop on some hospice care agencies
Caring for patients at end-of-life requires experience, communication skills, sensitivity, and medical knowledge.
The majority are elder seniors, and I have cared for them over thirty years from home to the ICU. Providing adequate time to know them emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually allows trust to medically guide them through life.
End-of-life is sacrosanct, requiring delicate discussion with patients and families long before the decent begins.
The recent haste to move hospice care to the forefront is an effort to control healthcare costs since statistically most Medicare money is spent in the last year of life. Shrinking this time period is wrought with danger if profit-motive is allowed to run rampant without transparency and supervision.
Indeed, this is exactly what has occurred in a wave of horror stories due to inexperienced on-the-job training. Hospice agencies have multiplied at an exponential rate spurred by a serpentine and clandestine payment system luring unsuspecting patients into a profiteering scheme with payoffs and kickbacks.
Where are the investigative reporters, whistleblowers, doctors, and nurses to reveal this targeted assault on elder seniors by some hospice agencies?
Slowly, The Greatest Generation is being eliminated.
In the crosshairs: Baby Boomers.
Gene Uzawa Dorio, M.D.
I just saw this Snippet today. Great timing because, I also read today Steve Lopez’s Sunday column in the LA Times, in which he says he got hundreds of responses to his Jan. 19 article about his mother’s less-than-ideal final days in hospice care. Hopefully, he will take on some of the questions you ask in his columns to come.