Dying for Dollars: The Corporatization of Hospice Care

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/books/dying-dollars-corporatization-hospice-care



From a mission of mercy, hospice has evolved into a $14 billion industry, increasingly run by corporate chains, and nobody gets more credit, or blame, than the Reverend Hugh Westbrook. He invented the very idea of the corporate hospice, when he and a couple of partners opened the first for-profit program, in Dallas, in 1984—right after the Medicare law he was instrumental in crafting began to pay for hospice services. Over the next two decades, he grew the company into VITAS Innovative Hospice Care, the largest hospice chain in the United States—or anywhere, for that matter, because hospice chains do not exist abroad. In the process, Westbrook proved the unthinkable: A business can make a fortune caring for dying people.

Certainly he did. He had yachts, a Florida beachfront mansion, and a mountain home in North Carolina. He invested in a string of companies. He wrote big checks to Democratic candidates—his name would turn up on an infamous list of donors who received an invitation to sleep in the White House Lincoln Bedroom in exchange for a minimum $50,000 donation to President Clinton’s re-election campaign. And all that happened before he made the really big money, by cashing out to Roto-Rooter, a publicly traded company and a longtime VITAS investor.

Roto-Rooter already owned about 25 percent of VITAS when it acquired the rest of the company, in a $406 million deal in 2004. Westbrook walked away with about $200 million.

He signed the standard agreements not to compete, which kept him out of the hospice world for eight years. In that time, the industry changed more dramatically than even he could have imagined. A wave of mergers, acquisitions, and investments made hospice another Wall Street commodity to be traded, with one goal: maximizing returns. Roto-Rooter kept its hospice operations under the VITAS name but rebranded the corporate parent as Chemed Corp. The name had a ring of scientific authority and did not call to mind clogged drains.

[Lancero]

1. Corps want to squeeze out all they can out of a person before they die.

Given that some have taken out life insurance policies on their employee's, this here doesn't really surprise me.

[moondust]

2. If young people can die for Cheney and Halliburton,

is it too much to ask old people to die for Roto-Rooter?