Hospice Needs You as an Advocate

The Medicare Hospice Benefit will be slashed 3.1% on October 1, 2009 without intervention from Congress. Click here to find out how your voice can be heard to help stop these proposed cuts.

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Hospice: Healthcare that Cares More and Costs Less

• Hospice care is part of the solution for patients and families, and is a model of cost‐efficient and high‐quality health care delivery.
• More than 1.4 million patients with a life‐limiting illness received services from the nation’s hospice providers last year, with more than 98% of served families willing to recommend hospice to others.
• Hospice is a Medicare cost saver. In 2007, an independent, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded study by Duke University found that hospice reduced Medicare costs by $2,300 per patient, amounting to more than $2 billion in savings per year.
• Research shows that costs in the last week of life can be reduced by one‐third when people facing a life‐limiting illness have discussions with their physician about end‐of‐life care preferences2.
• Research has also shown that hospice patients lived an average 29 days longer than similar patients who did not opt for hospice care3.
• Patients and families facing catastrophic and terminal illness could receive higher quality care, and the financial burden on the health care delivery system could be eased, if patients were able to receive timely access to hospice services at an earlier stage in their care.