Friday, July 26, 2019

New Office of Inspector General Report: Hospice Deficiencies Pose Risks to Medicare Beneficiaries

WHY WE DID THIS STUDY  

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) has identified significant vulnerabilities in the Medicare hospice benefit and found that hospices did not always provide needed services to beneficiaries and sometimes provided poor quality care.  Click here to view report.

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

"Do or Refer" Doctors Are Not Allowed to Use Their Best Judgment for Individual Patients (No More Jeanette Halls)

Jeanette Hall with her son Scott
shortly after she changed
her mind.
Margaret Dore Esq., MBA*

Yesterday, a doctor asked me about "do or refer" provisions in some of the newer bills seeking to legalize assisted suicide in the United States. For this reason, I now address the subject in the context of a 2018 Wisconsin bill, which did not pass.

The bill, AB 216, required the patient's attending physician to "fulfill the request for medication or refer," i.e. to write a lethal prescription for the purpose of killing the patient, or to make an effective referral to another physician, who would do it.

The bill also said that the attending physician's failure to comply would be "unprofessional conduct" such that the physician would be subject to discipline. The bill states: