[ed. This makes my blood boil. Take a service designed to provide pain relief, compassion and dignity for dying people and their families, and turn it into a for-profit scam with all manner of quota goals, incentives and conflicts of interest for ripping off Medicare and double-dipping on family payments. There appears to be no limit to corporate greed.]
Janet Stubbs was grateful when the nursing home recommended hospice care for her aunt Midge. Although Stubbs knew her aunt wasn’t dying, the offer of free, Medicare-paid hospice visits from a nurse and chaplain, plus an extra weekly bath, was too good to pass up.
Stubbs didn’t know that her aunt, Doris Midge Appling, was admitted to Hospice Care of Kansas during the company’s “Summer Sizzle” promotion drive, which paid employees as much as $100 a head for referrals, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Stubbs also said she had no clue that the nursing home doctor who referred her aunt for hospice moonlighted as medical director for the hospice company.
“It doesn’t seem right,” said Stubbs, who had Appling’s power of attorney to make medical decisions. “What incentive did the doctor have to put my aunt on hospice? How much was she being paid?”
Harden Healthcare LLC, the hospice’s current owner, said medical directors received no incentive pay. Appling’s doctor, Donna Ewy, didn’t return four calls seeking comment.
Hospice care, once chiefly a charitable cause, has become a growth industry, with $14 billion in revenues, 1,800 for-profit providers and a base of Medicare-covered patients that doubled to 1.1 million from 2000 to 2009.
Compensation based on enrollment numbers, pay to nursing- home doctors who double as hospice medical directors, and gifts to the nursing facilities have helped fuel the boom, according to an examination of 1,000 pages of court documents and interviews with more than 45 current and former hospice employees, patients and family members.
by Peter Waldman, Bloomerg | Read more:
Janet Stubbs was grateful when the nursing home recommended hospice care for her aunt Midge. Although Stubbs knew her aunt wasn’t dying, the offer of free, Medicare-paid hospice visits from a nurse and chaplain, plus an extra weekly bath, was too good to pass up.
Stubbs didn’t know that her aunt, Doris Midge Appling, was admitted to Hospice Care of Kansas during the company’s “Summer Sizzle” promotion drive, which paid employees as much as $100 a head for referrals, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Stubbs also said she had no clue that the nursing home doctor who referred her aunt for hospice moonlighted as medical director for the hospice company.
“It doesn’t seem right,” said Stubbs, who had Appling’s power of attorney to make medical decisions. “What incentive did the doctor have to put my aunt on hospice? How much was she being paid?”
Harden Healthcare LLC, the hospice’s current owner, said medical directors received no incentive pay. Appling’s doctor, Donna Ewy, didn’t return four calls seeking comment.
Hospice care, once chiefly a charitable cause, has become a growth industry, with $14 billion in revenues, 1,800 for-profit providers and a base of Medicare-covered patients that doubled to 1.1 million from 2000 to 2009.
Compensation based on enrollment numbers, pay to nursing- home doctors who double as hospice medical directors, and gifts to the nursing facilities have helped fuel the boom, according to an examination of 1,000 pages of court documents and interviews with more than 45 current and former hospice employees, patients and family members.
by Peter Waldman, Bloomerg | Read more:
