Costs for end-of-life care rising, hospice care may be an antidote

Reuters: "Health care costs at the end of life show no signs of leveling off, according to new research from the United States and Canada published in the Archives of Internal Medicine." However, the growing use of hospice services and an emphasis on palliative care in lieu of curative treatments such as chemotherapy may "point the way toward bringing these costs down while improving patient care."

"Another study of dying heart failure patients found, however, that under the current U.S. system, more hospice didn't necessarily mean less spending," because hospice care doesn't always displace institutional care (Harding, 10/14).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.