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WEDNESDAY, July 25 (HealthDay News) -- Too few Americans entering life's final phase are availing themselves of high-quality hospice care, despite the fact that Medicare covers the expense, experts say.
The situation is only going to become more problematic as the nation's "baby boomers" reach the end of their expected life spans in coming decades, according to two articles in the July 26 New England Journal of Medicine.
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"Hospice care is underutilized -- only a third of Americans die under the care of hospice, and hospice care is free," noted the author of one article, Dr. Gail Gazelle, assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School. "Far too often, patients end up in an ICU, rushed to the emergency room, and they end up dying there, when really they would much rather have died in their own home," she added.
According to Gazelle, many of these patients avoid hospice, because they -- and often their doctors -- believe end-of-life care means they have "failed" in the face of disease. "They often view it as, 'OK, someone is telling me to crawl into my bed and die,'" she said. In reality, many hospice patients lead full, mobile and high-quality lives for months, Gazelle said.
There's also the misperception that hospice is expensive. Too often, terminal patients don't realize that Medicare and private insurance cover the full cost of hospice care.
And yet those aren't the only factors keeping terminal patients from the pain management and emotional support that comes with hospice, say oncologists Dr. Ingrid Katz, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Dr. Alexi Wright, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, both in Boston.
In a second journal article, they recounted the story of one Boston-area patient, Joanne Doolin, a 64-year-old mother of three with terminal colon cancer.
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