Hospice Care Is Associated with Lower Costs for Patients with Terminal Cancer

Use of hospice care for patients who are terminally ill has increased during the past few decades, but whether hospice care is more or less expensive than nonhospice care is unclear. To explore this issue, investigators used a Medicare database to identify 18,165 patients with poor-prognosis cancer who enrolled in hospice and matched them by age, sex, location, and disease severity (i.e., survival duration after cancer diagnosis) with 18,165 patients who did not choose hospice care. Patients in both groups lived for about 7 months after initial diagnosis.

Mean duration of hospice care was 11 days. During hospice care (or the equivalent period for those not enrolled in hospice), hospice patients were significantly less likely than nonhospice …