A New Era of For-Profit Hospice Care — The Medicare Benefit

To ensure that a reluctant medical community would embrace Medicare at its inception in 1965, Congress declared that any willing provider could participate. Since that time, the vast majority of physicians and hospitals have come to rely on Medicare as a major source of revenue. But as additional Medicare benefits have been created, they have increasingly been provided by for-profit companies that find doing business with government, though sometimes frustrating, a worthwhile commercial venture. Perhaps the most untraditional Medicare service offered by such organizations is hospice care.The hospice benefit was created in 1982 to offer terminally ill patients an . . .