Included in this comprehensive review of hospice should be payment methodologies, fiscal constraints review, alternative eligibility criteria, testing of new models of care, as well as any number of other issues. The hospice community is committed to work toward these goals.
Guiding this review ought to be several clear principles. Among them are:
- Advancing hospice and palliative care programs as the recognized providers of end-of-life care;
- Preserving and enhancing the Medicare hospice benefit;
- Recognizing "high quality" as the standard to which all providers must subscribe;
- Ensuring accountability through transparency and fair regulatory scrutiny; and
- Promoting increased access through expansion and collaboration.
We provided information about the January MedPAC meeting here. The March report is available here (PDF), in the last chapter of the document.
