It began by the man needing rehab, and then changed to his health care providers declaring him “terminal” and placing him in hospice.
Hospice morphine hasten death professional#
One case I read involved a woman professional whose 60-year-old boyfriend was basically hijacked by his sister and her husband, apparently so they could have access to his money. In looking through the hospice patient cases presented on, collected by Ron Panzer, it’s clear that there is a definite pattern to how hospice operates in securing and then “treating” their patients. That would certainly be my experience: my complaint was met with denials, lies, and offers of bereavement counselors. Most complaints made to or about hospice are ignored. For that, in a rare outcome, the head of the hospice got six and a half years in federal prison-for her treatment, and for his $20 million scheme to sign up people who were not dying. They cited a Texas nurse in their report who gave “high doses of morphine” whether “a patient needed it or not,” to justify getting “higher hospice payments.” And they reported the case of a woman with dementia being signed up a year before her scheduled demise. And in 2018, found that in 2006 Medicare had paid out $9.2 billion for one million hospice beneficiaries, and in 2016, that grew to $16.7 billion for 1.4 million beneficiaries. Also on the federal level, US Health and Human Services did a study showing that between 20, 80% of hospices had “deficiencies,” with 20% having “serious” deficiencies. In 2019 the Office of the Inspector General found millions of dollars of hospice Medicare fraud, and a “task force” was formed. In 2014, a Washington Post report found that hundreds of hospices did not provide promised care and in 2012, at least one in six had not. There is definitely a host of problems that could bring complaints. Many patients and their families never complain-but a 2017 Kaiser News study analyzing 3200 complaints filed against hospice companies over five years, found that with 75% of companies who did receive complaints, none suffered punishment.
The industry is also rarely punished when lawsuits or investigations claiming wrongdoing are brought. The now for-profit business is publicly traded and receives little government oversight, regulation, or inspection. The study reported hospice “marketers, doctors, rehab centers” trolling for ill (enough) patients for their purposes. In that year, one million died under hospice “care,” and nearly half of all Medicare patients died as home or institutional hospice patients. What has evolved in the American hospice industry seems to be a very successful melding of the image of Dame Saunders’ “compassionate” care with the use and apparent abuse of assisted suicide and what author and former hospice nurse Ron Panzer calls “ stealth euthanasia.”Ī 2014 Huffington Post study found that once Medicare introduced a hospice benefit in 1983, the hospice industry burgeoned into (by 2014) a $17 billion industry. Wald, in 1974, brought “assisted suicide” and “euthanasia” to her Connecticut hospice. Her philosophy was somewhat different from America’s hospice pioneer, Florence Wald, dean of Yale nursing.
Saunders brought compassionate (“palliative”) care to patients’ last days, advocating they die in their own time, and “naturally.” She did, however, introduce the use of morphine to ease pain. She was nurse, social worker and doctor, and dedicated her (much-decorated) life to helping the terminally ill. In the modern version, Dame Cicely Saunders is credited with beginning the movement with her London hospice in 1967. Of course, the good offices of monks and nuns had cared for the dying in medieval times and before. The hospice movement had some thought-provoking beginnings, at least the modern version. My brother and sister-in-law had prominently displayed her “Do Not Resuscitate Form” on the front of her refrigerator for months-and Hospice Inc. For me, that expendability was brought abruptly into focus when my mother, aided and abetted by my siblings, was quickly dispatched by large doses of morphine: even at 93-years-old, way ahead of her time to die. Such an attitude has increased the opportunities for the hospice/medical industry as it profits off the expendable bodies of older, vulnerable human beings. Deaths of the elderly seem of no account and only to be taken in stride. In this age of coronavirus, it has become abundantly clear that Western culture has little respect or reverence for its elders. –From Christopher Bollen, A Beautiful Crime Most hospice patients die from morphine, but I can only OD him within an acceptable margin of error.”
“I’ve given him the highest dosage I can.
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