Response to Misleading WaPo Hospice Article: Part the First

This article was very badly written. It is quite deceptive, the statistics are frequently wrong or cherry-picked, and the conclusion does not follow from the premises asserted. I was surprised that such a poor piece of journalism should fool so many people who should know better. Let’s start with the headlines: “Hospice firms draining billions from Medicare” and “Medicare rules create a booming business in hospice care for people who aren’t dying”. If they had instead chosen a headline of “Hospice firms save Medicare gobs and gobs of money while improving quality of life and honoring patient wishes, but some companies seem to be skimming a bit too much off the top for our liking (all while operating legitimately within the silly rules that we set up)”, then I’d have considerably less problem with the article. However, this would have been an honest headline, and it wouldn’t have generated much buzz. They went for inaccurate and misleading instead. A headline more worthy of the National Enquirer or Weekly World News than the Washington Post. “Hospice firms” are “draining billions from Medicare”? Really? Draining suggests waste or fraud. According to the article itself, Medicare expenditure on hospice in 2011 was $13.8 billion. Even if we charitably allow that $2 billion is enough to make “billions” truthful, are they really suggesting that one-seventh of the Medicare hospice budget was “drained” away? Hospice saves Medicare money. A lot of i...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Carer Workers Authors: Source Type: blogs