Now, you can go off hospice anytime you want. If you want your mom to go to the hospital, you can, on that day, just go away from hospice and back on Medicare. But — and this is a big but — that is not the purpose of hospice. The goal is to make a person comfortable when they are at the end stage of their life.
The last thing anyone would want is to be in the hospital, surrounded by tubes and machines, having your blood pressure taken all the time, especially when you’re trying to get to sleep, and then dying. That is not the way to go. But too many Americans do that because they want to do everything, and I mean everything, to stay alive when they might be at the end of their life.
Hospice benefits, and you can look them up, include visiting nursing assistants to help with bathing, nurses who come to the house to see how things are going, and social workers who check to see what you need. They provide hospital beds, adult diapers, medications and many other things to help your loved one stay at home when they are, in medical terms, transitioning.
In some ways, it seems like a hard choice — that going into hospice is just giving up. And then there is the “seagull effect.” Everyone at home with the ill person has made up their mind about what to do, and then someone from out of town, like a son or daughter who hasn’t been involved on a day-to-day basis, flies in and poops on the plan.