Congress and Industry Leaders Call for Crackdown on Hospice Fraud – By Ava Kofman (ProPublica) / Dec 19, 2022
Following a ProPublica-New Yorker investigation into the hospice industry, members of the Comprehensive Care Caucus and national trade groups are demanding reform.
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Less than three weeks after ProPublica and the New Yorker published an exposé of hospice fraud, members of Congress have called on the Department of Health and Human Services to “immediately investigate this situation.”
In a letter sent Friday to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Office of Inspector General, the bipartisan leaders of the Comprehensive Care Caucus wrote that “Medicare fraud cannot be tolerated, especially when it is being perpetrated on our nation’s most vulnerable patients.”
The ProPublica-New Yorker investigation described how the lucrative design of the Medicare benefit incentivizes many profit-seeking hospices to cut corners on care and target patients who are not actually dying. It chronicled the lack of regulation and the frustrated efforts of whistleblowers to hold end-of-life care conglomerates accountable. And it drew on state and federal data to reveal how, in the absence of oversight, the number of for-profit hospice providers in California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada has lately exploded.
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