Oncologists and Surgeons Bankrupt Hospice

This Connecticut hospice has filed a certificate of need in order to be able to close.  A member of the hospice’s board explained that over the past three years, the average patient stay at the center fell from 22.1 days to 9.6 day.  “People are being kept in these intensive therapy regimens longer, regardless of the outcome and in some cases their quality of life." 

Indeed, it is no surprise that people going to hospice (a) are much sicker, (b) have much more intense needs, and (c) move almost immediately into a situation where they are actively in the process of dying.  In the past week, the cancer profession has been charged with espousing an “ethos of very small benefit at whatever cost.”  And Kwok reports in the Lancet that nearly 40% of patients over 65 years old had surgery in their last year of life.