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National Alliance for Hospice Access (NAHA) http://hospiceaccess.org/

NAHA is a growing grassroots coalition of independent hospices that are family or community owned, and hospice patient advocates. NAHA's membership currently includes 185 hospices in 24 states that care for over 11,000 hospice patients every day - more than 30,000 each year - and employ over 6,000 caregivers in rural, inner city and suburban areas.

NAHA's members support the Preservation of Access to Hospice (PATH) Act (H.R 5542 and S. 2727), bi-partisan legislation which proposes temporary relief from a flawed 1982 hospice cap statute that is causing CMS to demand that hundreds of hospices repay millions of dollars that they already spent caring for eligible patients, simply because some of those patients lived longer than expected. The PATH Act would temporarily prevent CMS from making those demands, to allow independent hospices to continue to serve eligible terminally ill Medicare beneficiaries while policy makers develop a fiscally responsible, long term legislative solution.

NAHA welcomes Duke University's research[1] which concludes that Medicare's end-of-life care quality and economics would both benefit if Medicare promoted more hospice choice and longer hospice length of stay. The study describes hospice as "the rare situation whereby something that improves quality of life also appears to reduce costs” and confirms that hospice saves Medicare an average of $2,309 per user. Duke found hospice to be cost-effective for stays up to 154 days for non-cancer patients and, further, that even for lengths of stay above 180 days "…hospice is still likely to reduce their cost to the Medicare program for future days if they continue using it until death…”.