The photo of the handshake over coffee is not about exulting in the quality of EOL palliation. About improvement in Compassion and Care. It’s an agreement about money.
Troubling Headlines:
“The nation’s publicly-traded hospices.”
“We’re positioning our company to really be a player in the growing hospice pipeline.”
“On the hunt.”
“Vitas Hospice’s revenue is up 14% to $354 billion.”
“Venture Capitalists use IPOs as an exit strategy to reap a return from hospice companies they’ve invested in.”
Dr. Saunders is weeping from her eternal perch about these quotations on how the dying have become impersonal products in a financial portfolio: A player . . . On the hunt for . . . Recoup their investment . . . Poised for deals.
Examine the persistent emphasis on business vocabulary from national for-profits and the copious amount of copy spent on their financial transactions; versus, the dearth of examples on their pastoral-care offerings and the resources spent on end-of-life palliation and family education.
Where is the transparency on how the CMS pie is parceled? Obviously, the scale, time, and focus of these companies is transactional; not empathetic.
Does the regurgitation of business data in paragraph after paragraph by these companies who “scoop-up-hospices-recapitalize-then-merge-or-dump” while bleeding them for profits, the type of company you want to sign with for your loved one’s final months?
Our pastor said: If you want to know what you value in life, look at your “checkbook” expenditures. The same insight applies to the nature of these LinkedIn posts and company-website announcements: MONEY TALK.
QUESTION: What is the purpose of publicly-traded companies?
Ans: The main goal is to maximize shareholder value by generating as much profit as possible.
QUESTION: Do hospice patients receiving care from for-profit providers benefit from the millions and billions of dollars generated and higher and higher profit margins?
Ans: National statistics show that nonprofit hospice providers actually allocate more money/resources to patients and hospice-at-home family education than corporate hospices do.
When a medium-sized hospice company or a corporation with hospice subsidiaries has investors and stockholders that they are beholden to—what happens to the dying and employees in a culture designed to deliver huge returns for their business clients?
Do investors care about the common good? About a business built on the aging, the vulnerable, and the suffering?
They seem attracted to a hospice business for a never-ending supply of dying people. And, CMS pays them a daily rate—per person.
And with such physical deterioration—the negligence and medical mistakes are often hidden in the dying process.
The PE firm I worked for believed that achieving FINANCIAL success meant trying anything to make it happen; including a stab at health-insurance fraud. At staffers.
My book promotes the many great hospice providers and how to identify them.
