Hospice Eligibility Requirements: Am I Overreacting?

Medicare hospice benefits are specifically for the terminally ill. Medicare defines terminally ill as a doctor stating in writting that the client has 6 months or less to live.

Other medical services short of hospice are covered under A, B, C, and now D for prescriptions (which has actually turned out to be a good plan in most instances)

They are not saying they won't keep you alive if you need medical help. They just mean if you are going to go they will set you up in hospice for 6 months. Otherwise someone with say cancer would be able to stay in hospice for years rather than just getting treatment at a hospitol and living at home or with relatives.

just my $0.02

we have anything to worry about? You don't think the fact that they accepted Terri Schiavo as a patient even though she wasn't terminally ill and that they were so supportive of Michael is any sign of where they are headed? You don't think that we need to worry that they are going to be one of the biggest supporters of Euthanasia in the future?

I'm asking this because I hope that I am wrong and hoping that you will ease my mind. I am hoping that I am simply thinking like a conspiracy theorists and that this isn't another one of those slippery slopes that we have been sliding down full force over the last few decades.

I had hospice care for my mother back in the early 90's and loved the services they provided.

I've just heard so many horror stories of late and reading this excerpt has me concerned. You see I have a great deal of experience in the healthcare industry as well and have a little bit of knowledge of how things work.

Hi,

You are right to be concerned. I did not know anything about Hospice until my sister was recently put into Hospice. Not because she was dying, but because she was in pain. We thought she was dying because they told us the symptoms of dying were that they quit eating and started sleeping more, and their breathing slows down. So
her children put her into Hospice. They did not tell us that these symptoms were all caused by being over-medicated. Her sleeping breath rate was down to 8 per minute. One day while she was in the hospital hospice, I told the nurses not to give her the Dilaudid which was in addition to the Phentynol patches she was on. Suddenly, my sister was alert and quite lucid, was able to eat and drank more liquids in one day than she had in two weeks. When the doctor heard what I had done, she was very upset and told the nurses to put her back on the Dilaudid, because I was not a direct family member. We wrote the doctor a letter requesting that they try other medications that might not make her tired that she could not eat or drink. The doctor refused, saying she promised my sister to keep her from pain. My sister was not in pain - the patches were working well for her that day. She is now so drugged up that she has not eaten or able to drink anything for weeks, yet her vitals are normal, her blood oxygen is normal (LUNG ca).
They are killing her from dehydration and malnutrition. She has been drugged up like this for two months now. How much quality life would she have had left it she would have been treated for the pain with the proper medications instead of being over-medicated to the point of not being able to talk, eat or drink.

I hope to get this message out to everyone. It is truly murder.

I would love to blog about your story if you would like. I have a Blog at another site that gets more traffic than this one, for my Blog anyhow.

If you are interested in my doing a Blog about your story, please email me anything else you can add to the above that you wouldn't mind me including in my Blog at iljasemail@yahoo.com. Make sure that you put in the subject line that it is Deb from Townhall so I will know to open the email and not delete it.

I'm so sorry about what is happening to your sister. (((Deb))))