Rise of for-profit hospice industry raises troubling questions, new study says

Ethical and quality concerns grow as end-of-life hospice care, once the province of charitable organizations, is increasingly dominated by investor-owned chains that cherry-pick patients and cut labor costs in order to maximize profits.

A new survey of hospice care in the United States says that the rapidly growing role of for-profit companies in providing end-of-life care for terminally ill patients raises serious concerns about whose interests are being served under such a commercial arrangement: those of shareholders or those of dying patients and their loved ones.

"Under a corporate model of hospice care, there's an inherent conflict of interest between a company's drive to maximize profits and a patient's need for the kind of holistic, multidisciplinary and compassionate care originally envisioned by the founders of the modern hospice movement," said Dr. Robert Stone, an emergency medicine physician in Bloomington, Ind.