John Oliver: “Hospice care, when done well, is hugely beneficial to those that are dying and their families. It is too important to just hope the free market fixes it.”John Oliver: “Hospice care, when done well, is hugely beneficial to those that are dying and their families. It is too important to just hope the free market fixes it.”in the US. Doing so is “an almost offensive parody of this show”, he acknowledged. “If somebody else did that, it would genuinely be hurtful.
The first American hospice began caring for patients in 1974, and more followed, mostly composed of charities staffed by volunteers. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan authorized Medicare to cover the costs of hospice after advocates argued that it would be cheaper than paying for the aggressive treatments that so many patients received up until they died.
According to a recent survey, over one in five families did not think their hospice service provided timely help. Oliver pointed to documented cases of fraud, such as a company who billed Medicare for 17 days of care for a 70-year-old they never visited, and just called his family to inquire on how he was doing. “It’s hard to defend the quality of that company’s service when they were quite literally phoning it in,” he said.
Oliver used the example of a company called Merida, where several nurses testified that the majority of the patients were not terminally ill, including one who had a regular job at Walmart. The group also enrolled people with illnesses like Alzheimer’s and dementia by falsely telling them they had less than six months to live, even sending chaplains to lie to the patients. “Which is horrendous,” said Oliver. “Frankly, anyone who took part in that deserves to rot in hell.