Last week, the New York lawyer common announced the findings of an investigation into a for-profit nursing home in Orleans County.
There is a associated bill that handed each homes of the state Legislature this 12 months that will prohibit the institution of recent for-profit hospices in New York.
Long time Health Committee Chairman state Assemblyman Dick Gottfried discussed the bill and his 52-year-long tenure within the Legislature with Capital Tonight.
“The way the bill came about is that the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), about a year ago, published a study of for-profit hospice programs around the country, compared to non-profits, and found just pretty shocking results,” he mentioned.
The outcomes of JAMA’s research indicated that for-profit hospices supplied a decrease high quality of care, a decrease depth of care they usually tended to steer away from serving sufferers who had extra advanced circumstances that required extra time to look after them.
Additionally, an article printed this month by ProPublica and digitally launched in The New Yorker, titled “How Hospice Became a For-Profit Hustle,” outlined a number of cases of fraud concentrating on the Medicare hospice profit.
According to the Hospice and Palliative Care Association of New York State (HPCANYS), the examples in The New Yorker article “represent the worst of greed in healthcare, but in no way represent the excellent care thousands of New Yorkers have received from their local hospice. Hospice in New York has been and continues to be a trusted source of care at one of the most difficult times in life. We are proud that 95% of New York State’s hospices are not-for-profit, and that the two for-profit hospices in the State have an excellent care record.”
HPCANYS is supportive of the Gottfried/Krueger laws.
“Of the 40 or so hospice entities in New York, two of them are for-profit,” Gottfried mentioned. “In the rest of the country, it is much more common to have for-profit entities. So, we’re lucky that we don’t have much of a for-profit sector in hospice care.”
Gottfried additionally sponsors a bill to prohibit the growth of for-profit nursing houses in New York state. While the Assembly handed the bill, the Senate has not acted on it.
“A lot of the kinds of problems we see with for-profit nursing homes you also see with for-profit hospice programs, and so I felt, that, particularly since we don’t have much of a for-profit sector in New York, better to close the barn door before the horse gets out of the barn, and that’s what the bill does,” Gottfried mentioned.
A.8472 (Gottfried) / S.9387 (Krueger) has not but been delivered to Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has till the tip of the 12 months to signal it.