Everyone Deserves A Good Death

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.

So this is an old-fashioned rootin' tootin' episode of stuff you should know

and about something we need to talk about, Chuck.

Okay?

Okay.

Do you remember back in like the

like about like the 2009, 10, 11 era when like death was all the rage?

People were having like death cafes and like creating living whales and it was just a big thing that everybody talked about.

When was this?

Like 2009 to 2000 maybe 11.

I don't remember that, but I'll take your word for it.

It was a real thing for sure, unless I've just completely lost my marbles and I just made up a whole era of American culture.

I don't think I did.

But that has died itself.

Like that it's gone back to, death has gone back to being a bit of a taboo topic, an uncomfortable topic,

at least here in the United States.

I didn't know that either.

It's true.

I guess I'm just speaking for myself anecdotally.

Oh, okay.

That makes a lot more sense.

So, okay, well, let's just cut to the chase here.

There's this concept of a good death.

Yeah.

Right.

And

you can probably fill in a lot of the blanks of what that means or what it means to you at least, but there's actually like some components to it that studies have found like kind of bubble up to the top that most people can agree this makes a good death.

There are things like getting to say goodbye to friends and family, having those people at your side if you want.

So, a certain amount of control over the dying process is something.

Being pain-free, not suffering.

Sure.

Being in an environment and having a chance to

come to terms with the fact you're about to expire.

Those are some of the top things that people say, like, this to me is a good death.

And not coincidentally, those are the kind of things that hospices, which we're about to talk about today, are intended to provide.

That's the service they provide, is to give you, the individual, a good death.

And it's not something that's relegated to the rich.

It's not something that's relegated to the

educated.

It's for everybody.

Everybody deserves to have a good death.

And that's pretty much the

motto of hospice.

And in fact, I ran across one motto.

It said, if you can't add more days to life, add more life to days.

That's great.

It sounds a little too corporate slogan-y, but I like the sentiment.

Yeah, there's a mascot, Louis the Dead Guy,

who's like always saying that slogan.

And he did a partnership with Home Depot for some reason recently.

Oh, boy.

Well, that explains the orange bed sheets and things.

Right.

All right.

So that's probably the last semi-joke we're going to make.

You'll have to forgive us for that.

We did a whole episode on dying, and I don't even know if we made one joke in that one.

So sure, we did.

You think?

Yes, I absolutely think.

All right.

Well, we'll pair that with this one.

And because we got a lot of great feedback on the dying episode and how that kind of helped people out.

So

maybe this will do the same.

We should probably go back in time a bit and explain the history of hospice because it is very recent.

If you look at sort of the timeline of people in the world dying,

hospice has only been around since like the 60s or 70s and the form that we know it.

Because previous to that,

for all of time, basically, medicine was like, hey, we're here to cure people.

And if it turns out that we cannot cure you and that the end is near for a very, very long time until the last, like, you know, like I said, since the 60s or 70s, very shamefully,

hospitals and even doctors would sort of like,

it was a reminder that they couldn't save you.

So they they didn't spend a lot of time with you.

And there are a lot of, you know, well-known reports of people kind of like scurrying past rooms where people were in their final days in a hospital and stuff like that.

Yeah, they left the dying who were incurable now to basically die alone.

They withdrew support.

That was just what they did.

Like you said, it was a reminder of the failing of medicine.

And this was a time when modern medicine was not in any kind of mood to be reminded of failings because, I mean, the 20th century was pretty triumphant for it.

i mean i saw the um the infant mortality rate decline by 90 over the century there's like sanitation clean drinking water polo vaccine like science could do anything and people who were incurable were just a reminder that there were limits to that whole thing that's right uh and another thing that was going on and this is also pretty shameful well i guess not shameful but uh they've since revisited how they look at uh at pain management but yeah um you had to like

really be in pain to get pain management, and then that had to like wear off and you had to be really in pain again for them to administer more pain management.

They were worried about opioid addiction and stuff like that.

But

these days it's definitely more like, hey, you know, we're not worried about you getting addicted to opioids in the final possibly days of your life.

We just want to make you feel okay.

Yeah, that's definitely the hospice philosophy is you don't have to wait until one painkiller wears off to get another dose.

You can, you know, stay comfortable.

That's the point is to make the person comfortable.

That's called palliative care.

We'll talk a little more about that, but it's essentially just taking care of symptoms to keep people comfortable.

Yeah, for sure.

Nuns were kind of on the scene early on providing, you know, emotional support.

They couldn't dose out pain medication, of course, and stuff like that.

But they, you know, it was a lot of times it was religious organizations that were stepping forward that were kind of doing the hospice type work that would come along in the 60s and 70s, thanks in part to a couple of big landmark books that came out.

Yeah, there was this whole thing in the 60s and 70s that was kind of this rebellious streak that went across like or against some of the just unquestioned institutions.

And one of those was medicine and doctors and hospitals.

But there was a psychiatrist named Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who very famously came up with the five stages of grief.

And that was in her 1969 book on death and dying.

And in addition to being famous for coming up with the five stages of grief, she also basically interviewed people in the Chicago hospitals, ICU,

who were dying and just found that they were just being totally neglected.

And so she definitely lobbied for dying and

dying people and their families to be listened to and to be treated rather than just ignored.

Yeah, we talked about her and that book in our dying episode.

I don't think we talked about the denial of death from 1973, but that was from an anthropologist named Ernest Becker.

And

he was writing this as he was dying himself.

So he was in a position to really give a good, you know, pretty moving first-person account.

And he talked about sort of, you know, a good death and accepting the inevitability and stuff like that.

So these things were sort of happening in the cultural movement when a woman, a hero, I think, named Cicely Saunders came along, eventually the founder and medical director of St.

Christopher's Hospice in London, and she really changed the game and kind of birthed the whole sort of modern hospice movement.

Yeah, she had a bad back from a young age, and apparently it kept her from her desired career of nursing.

So she instead became basically a social worker.

At the time, they called a lady almaner or distributor of alms, right?

So it's pretty old-timey, but it does kind of, it's a nod back to the original hospice, which were founded in the Crusades by the Roman Catholic Church.

Ironically, Cicely Saunders was raised an atheist, but she had a conversion to Christianity, evangelical Christianity even, when she went on vacation with a Christian friend and her family.

And one of the other big experiences that led her to found the hospice movement, essentially, was she had

like some friendships with some people that she helped essentially as they were dying and um really kind of was moved by these friendships and wanted to make sure that other people had that same experience so she did something that um i mean just kind of i think really gets across the kind of person she was and she went to medical school to make her voice a little more credible yeah she started medical school at age 33 uh this is in the 1950s and she finished medical school She was able to work as a physician.

She started writing articles and stuff about this, about people being deserted or feeling like they'd been deserted by their doctors, like the closer they got to death, like we were talking about, and said, hey, there's got to be a better way to take care of people.

not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually as

they near death.

So she got that medical degree, got a research job at a hospital, started studying.

She wanted to have a legitimate sort of background for this so people didn't think she was just some

wacky empath trying to do good, which should be enough.

But she figured if she was armed with medical training and real data

on like pain management and stuff, that she would go a lot further.

And she did.

Yeah, she went and studied pain management firsthand so she could come up with her own protocols.

One of those protocols that was really groundbreaking and went against the norm was to to give dying patients not just heavy doses of morphine to make sure that they weren't in pain, but also cocaine to keep them from just being kind of doped up for the rest of their lives.

She would find out what liquor they preferred and would make sure that they had their liquor.

And all of this sounds like just completely reckless and careless.

But she had before and after pictures of these people, terminal cancer patients who

in the before pictures, before they had been treated with her new new protocol of pain management and I guess mood management too, if you think about it,

they did not look very good.

They looked like terminal cancer patients.

And afterward, they were sitting up in bed, perked up.

Some had taken up hobbies like knitting.

And she would show these before and after pictures when she went around the world speaking on behalf of hospice as she was trying to found it.

And like she would get converts at every talk she gave just from the before and after pictures alone.

Yeah, it was pretty remarkable.

This all culminated in 1967 when she founded St.

Christopher's Hospice, like I mentioned earlier in London.

And kind of right off the bat, she said, all right, we have a new way to deal with pain management.

We're going to get rid of visiting hours and people, family can come and go when it's convenient for them.

And we're going to not talk about just, you know, physical pain.

We're going to talk about what I call total pain, or what she called that.

You know, like we mentioned, emotional support,

social support, spiritual suffering that happens with people.

And one of the people that she worked a lot with was a nurse in the U.S.

named Florence Wald, who ended up doing the same thing in the U.S.

She said, I think we need this over here.

She started up the very first hospice in Branford, Connecticut, in the United States.

And that was six years later after the one in London in 1973.

Yeah, that first American hospice, they tried a few names out before they settled on the final one, hospice R Us,

McDying,

and then they just kind of went with the straight name.

Wow, all right.

So, um, yeah, so hospice that spread pretty quickly.

I think you said St.

Christopher's opened up in 1967,

um, and uh, the one in Branford opened up in 1973.

That's pretty good traction to create a brand new idea in both the UK and the US and start spreading it around the world.

And one of the things I think you said said about St.

Christopher's was even though it was religious or at least spiritual, it was non-denominational.

And that is a huge point about hospice that is lost on a lot of people.

I think a lot of people associate it with religious groups still.

And like, if you're not, say, Christian, you wouldn't really want to go to a Christian hospice.

That is not at all the way that hospices work.

And in fact, there's plenty of people who are atheists.

They are humanists.

And they just are like those empathic do-gooders that you were speaking about earlier.

And none of these philosophies clash because they all come together to essentially say one of the big parts of dying is some sort of spirituality or at least some sort of peace that we associate with spirituality.

It doesn't matter how you get there.

We're all just kind of coming together to make sure that everybody can experience that.

It's a big misunderstanding of hospice sometimes.

Yeah, for sure.

In the U.S., U.S., it's usually,

or at least at first it was done at home.

That was a difference from the early ones in the U.K.

They were inpatient facilities.

But in the U.S., you know, it was sort of a budget issue at first because they couldn't get these facilities and pay for them.

But I think they also realized that people wanted to die at home.

And there was also this sort of long-running institutional distrust that Americans had.

And it was a lot of volunteer work at first, like almost entirely volunteer early on.

It was sometime, like we mentioned, people in the clergy still doing this kind of work after centuries of doing so.

Doctors that were moonlighting that wanted to help out.

And a movement was,

you know, clearly growing.

And it made government sit up and take notice when they realized that it was saving money on health care because not only was the movement growing and people were just feeling better about it, but it was keeping people out of the hospitals sort of off and on, off and on, off and on.

And so much though that the U.S.

government and the Reagan administration said, you know what,

we should get this covered.

And in 1982, the hospice

Medicare benefit went through, which allowed people all of a sudden to be able to pay from

staff run by professionals that were also paid and get it covered through Medicare.

Yeah, which opened up the door for people who wanted to help people during the the final days or weeks of their life, but there wasn't a career associated with it.

Now there was.

So you could pursue that kind of medicine, end-of-life medicine.

That's pretty cool that that was a huge change.

I suspect that the saving money had a lot to do with it, though.

Yeah.

That's usually the case.

And the reason why, let's just spell it out explicitly.

The reason why it saves money is because you're taking a patient off of a very expensive track, which is a lot of different medical procedures and treatments and saying,

You're not going to go for the curative treatment route anymore.

We're going to take you out of this crazy, nut-so-medical world and put you in a much more peaceful, tranquil world where you can end your days as a happier person rather than feeling like a guinea pig being experimented on.

And it's just much cheaper to do that, too, as you can imagine.

It feels like a good breakpoint.

Yay?

Yay.

All right.

We'll come back and we'll talk about how the modern system works right after this.

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So here in the United States, Chuck,

hospice is usually paid for by Medicare, which is federal

insurance coverage for people who are retirees typically or maybe disabled.

And then also sometimes Medicaid, which covers lower-income Americans.

And the upshot of all this is that if you are dying and choose to go on hospice care, you are not charged for this.

And that is a wonderful thing that the federal government does.

Apparently, the UK is very much like that, but a lot of it is donation-driven rather than paid for by the government, which does chip in, but the lion's share is paid for by donations in the UK.

But there's eligibility requirements that basically say, like, if you don't check these boxes or if you stop checking these boxes at any point, you can't be in hospice anymore.

Yeah.

And those boxes specifically, you have to have two doctors certify that you have a, and this is for Medicare, you know, to get it covered, not just to get into hospice.

Right.

You have to have a terminal illness.

You have to have six months or less to live.

And you cannot be going after curative treatments.

And we'll talk about some,

I don't even know if they're exceptions, but some things that some people might think are curative treatments and aren't curative treatments.

That doesn't mean like,

don't ask for anything at all.

You know, you can't have a band-aid.

Yeah, you're on your own.

So we'll get into those.

But

and this is going to be a sticking point that kind of comes up later in some of the failings of the current system.

But Medicare pays

hospice

companies and agencies a daily rate instead of for specific services they provide, like

like basically all the other medical treatment you're ever going to get.

And there are four levels of that care and they're going to be different rates depending on the level that you're going to get and also where you are.

Right.

So

if you're running a hospice, you would get a flat fee paid by the government for a patient who's in routine home care, which is you're not in crisis, you're still dying, but you're doing okay.

And that usually is just a visit maybe a couple of times a week.

They're coming by to make sure that their meds are going down right.

They maybe have like their nutrition going.

They're just essentially just checking on you.

That's routine home care.

There's also continuous home care, where if that patient slips into a crisis, like maybe they start vomiting uncontrollably, they start suffering uncontrollable pain that their meds aren't doing anything for anymore, changes in consciousness, all of a sudden now they have 24-7

hospice access at home.

Yeah, there's also there's a couple of more.

There's inpatient respite care.

That's when a patient goes into like a, you know, they have to leave home to go into a physical hospice center for up to five days.

A lot of times this is to give their caregiver time off because that's one of the brutal parts about end of life is

And I say burden on the family, not like what a hassle, but you know, it is a burden on the family.

Yeah.

People have to,

besides the emotional devastation they're going through, a lot of times have to rearrange their

jobs and like even leave jobs sometime to do this kind of thing full time.

So it can be quite a heavy burden on a family.

Yeah, actually, Chuck, that that's a, if you look up downsides of hospice, that's pretty much the number one issue with it is that it it transfers responsibility for caring for the dying patient from say like a hospital to their family.

And that's a, that's, that's, it is, it's a very big deal.

Yeah.

And then the last one is general inpatient care.

And that is when you're addressing pain control or any kind of symptom management that you can't, that you have to like go in and take care of at a specific place.

It's not the kind of thing you can do at home generally.

And then, you know, palliative care is a big part of it.

That's what we kind of mentioned earlier is, is just making people feel better.

toward the end.

You know, I mentioned things that don't count as curative treatment, like if you're,

if you have heart, like active heart failure, they can try and reverse that.

Or if you have some like nasty bed sore that gets an infection,

that's not going to boot you off

covered hospice care to get that taken care of.

No, the key to being covered for hospice under Medicare is that you are not pursuing treatment to cure the...

thing that's got you terminally ill.

Right.

So like you said, if you have develop a heart condition, but that's not what's killing you, you have terminal cancer, they can treat your heart condition.

And even if you do have terminal cancer, if you have nausea from cancer or pain from cancer, they're going to treat that because they're not trying to cure the cancer.

You have to give up things like radiation or chemotherapy.

Those are curative treatments.

But there's the idea that they're just like, nope, sorry, we're just going to put you in bed and basically let you lay there.

That's not at all what you have to give up in in order to enter hospice.

Yeah.

And, you know, the hospice workers are doing

a lot of stuff for you that goes above and beyond just making you feel better or maybe sitting with you and like, you know, brushing your hair.

Like there's all that stuff that they're doing, bathing you,

housekeeping sometimes, you know, helping out with gathering and administering the medications.

But, you know, they're doing all kinds of stuff.

They might be shopping for you.

They might be babysitting for your family to give, you know,

like we mentioned, the people in your family that are caring for you, like to give them a break.

They may help with fundraising.

If you have like, you know, money you need raised for your treatment, they may bring in music and comedy performances to hospice centers.

people that cut hair, like volunteers that will come in and style somebody's hair even.

I remember that was a big deal for Emily's grandmother near the end is, you know, she wanted her hair done and to look like she looked.

And that stuff goes a long way to just putting people at ease, you know.

Oh, for sure.

Another one that volunteers can do is take care of the person's pet to make sure that if the person is opting for in-home hospice, that their pet doesn't have to go live with somebody else because they can't care for it anymore.

So you can go and feed somebody's pet, take them for a walk, change the litter box.

And then something as simple as just sitting with somebody and watching TV with them is enough.

And like, this is just a volunteering opportunity in the United States and the UK, basically anywhere there's hospice, they would very much like you to volunteer to just basically be there.

And just being a human being who can drive a car over to somebody's house is essentially the qualifications.

That's basically all you need to do.

And they'll tell you what to do from there.

But no one would expect you to like, you know, inject the person.

As a matter of fact, you'd probably get in big trouble if you did inject the person with anything.

You just need to be there.

and in addition to just being there for the person the patient like you said that gives the caregiver some time to just go take a shower do something just stop being a caregiver for a couple of hours too Yeah, and you know, even though a lot of them are professionals, like most of them now, there's still quite a lot of volunteers that do this kind of thing.

That Medicare law that I talked about in 1982 that stipulated that hospice facilities have at least 5% of the patient hours provided for by volunteers.

So that's one of the reasons.

And also just because there are people in the world, you know, some people have maybe gone through this with a family member and then they want to give back.

Some people are just wired this way as empaths to want to help people.

And then sometimes it's people that are preparing for a career in healthcare.

And, you know, getting in a hospice and kind of going through the worst of the worst situations is, I imagine, pretty good preparation on dealing with any kind of patient.

Yeah, and you would prepare for a career in that because hospices, like you said, they are professionally staffed and not just with nurses, not just with hospice doctors, but social workers, bereavement counselors, some of those clergy,

and just general aides

who can come together and help with that.

that thing that Cicely Saunders started kind of seeing clearly, the total pain, where, you know, if you have psychological pain, it's going to make your physical pain exacerbated and vice versa.

And the worse off you are, the more hesitant people might be to come visit you because they feel hopeless or they're just freaked out or something like that.

So now you have social pain.

So if you have all these people coming together to treat the person's total pain, you have a much calmer, happier.

again, good death.

And those are called in the hospice industries, interdisciplinary groups.

And they do.

They form a team for each patient to figure out what to do for each of the patients to help them

basically find peace and comfort and calm.

Yeah.

And this is a, you know, it's a booming industry now in the United States.

And we'll sort of get to the downsides of that in a little bit.

But statistically,

from 2,000 hospice centers in 2001

to about 5,700 today,

you know, 24, 25 years later, it's really grown a lot.

Utilization grew by 32% between 2013 and 2022.

There was a 25% increase in Medicare beneficiaries, obviously, is the boomer generation is aging.

But that doesn't account for all of it, you know, 25% compared to 32%.

About half of people now in the United States enroll in a hospice before their death.

If you have cancer, you're far more likely to do so, as well as being female and more educated and also older,

which at first seemed like a,

of course.

But just so far as to say, if you're someone very tragically in your younger life that is stricken with something like this, you're far less likely to enroll in hospice.

Yeah, and there's actually a lot of reasons why people don't enroll in hospice.

A good majority of them just don't either aren't really aware of it or don't understand it.

And there's stigmas about hospice too.

Like there's a whole idea that if you go into hospice, you're giving up on fighting for your life.

You're giving up on living.

And that's just absolutely not true.

Like, if you have a terminal illness and it's really no longer treatable, a good doctor will say, like, there's nothing more we can do for you.

There's plenty of stuff we can do for you, but none of it is going to extend your life.

It's going to make your last days pretty miserable.

We recommend that you go into hospice and have like good last days.

Hang out with your friends and family.

Like be peaceful.

That's actually, as far as the American Society of Clinical Oncology is concerned, that's a sign that you've had good cancer care.

That toward the end in the last, you know, few weeks, your cancer team says you've reached the incurable stage.

There's nothing we can do for you anymore, except let's put you into hospice.

The problem is, is there are plenty of doctors out there who do see that as quitting, do see that as giving up, and are known to steer people into hospice too late to where essentially they just spend spend like the last couple or few days in hospice and they don't have a chance to actually

develop what again is referred to as a good death.

Yeah, and

there's even evidence that going, like trying to cure yourself and sort of ceasing that process and starting up with hospice can actually make people live longer.

A lot of reasons.

Maybe you're being monitored a little more closely.

Maybe your symptoms are being managed a little

better.

And just everything that goes into the non-physical, you know, sick and dying part that we've been talking about, the emotional part and everything else, like if all of that is eased,

studies show that you can make it a little bit longer.

Yeah, that actually happened to Yumi's dad.

He was in hospice and given.

Oh man, I remember.

Not very, yeah.

It was just

a pretty raw time.

He was given not much time to live at all, I think like days.

And he

didn't pass.

And Yumi started to notice he was actually kind of, he was eating more.

His mood was starting to improve.

And she convinced the hospice doctor that he was not dying anymore.

And one of the things that became really clear that being in hospice at home can do to improve your health is that you're getting better nutrition.

You're getting good sleep.

You're surrounded by people who don't have to come see you in the hospital setting during visiting hours.

And all of those things are terribly managed in the hospital.

So at home, you can just get better and better.

And

Yumi's dad eventually left hospice, was discharged alive and went on to live for another three years.

Man, I remember all that going down and Jerry and I, all of us being like, oh, man, this is like, this seems like it's it.

And you were bringing reports, you were like, man, the darndest thing.

Yeah.

And then I just, I think we all suspected it was just going to happen again right after that.

And it was, yeah, it was a few years.

It was just, what a story.

Yeah.

I'm, I'm, I'm, I've never been more proud of anybody than I am of Yumi.

She was the only one who saw, like, she saw it.

And she had to convince everybody else, including me, that no, he's not dying.

And she brought him back for sure.

So, yeah.

What a gift.

It really was a gift.

I'm, yeah, I'm very proud of her.

All right.

Shall we take another break?

I think we should, man.

All right.

We'll be right back and we're going to finish up with hospice right after this.

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Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.

On our news season, we're bringing you a new Snafu every single episode.

32 lost nuclear weapons.

You're like, wait, stop?

What?

Yes.

Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.

Who still wore knee pads?

Yes.

It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.

The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.

I'm like, oh, wow.

Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.

So

let's see how it goes.

Listen to season four of Snafu with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

One thing we should mention kind of briefly, we don't have to get too much into it, but hospice and

right to die and assisted dying,

these are two things that don't go together, but they obviously kind of do go together in a lot of ways because you've got

a group of people that are,

it's the same group of people mainly.

It's even,

I think, legally designated in places where you do have the right to die.

You have to have doctors sign off that you're within six months and there is no cure.

And it kind of is in lockstep with hospice, but it's not the same thing because the, you know, it's it's just not.

The World Health Organization very much defines palliative care as something that neither hastens nor postpones death.

It is not the point of hospice to go in and,

you know.

find an empath who will who will help assist you along a little quicker.

If you live in one of those states, I think it's an amazing gift to be able to do that.

And

there's a track for doing that, but it's not hospice.

No, and the reason why it riles up hospice people who are against that is because there are one of the reasons that people do choose medically assisted dying is to end their suffering.

And hospice people are like, no, we know how to end their suffering without them having to die.

Yeah.

And that's why it really gets under their skin.

Although that said, there are plenty of hospice people, probably humanists, who are like,

it's anybody's inalienable right to choose how or when they die.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it is kind of a tricky thing, but it isn't, I think it is generally unfairly associated with hospice.

And even palliative care, I don't think we said explicitly, that is to treat and manage symptoms, pain, nausea, that kind of stuff, symptoms that come along with terminal illnesses.

And that is a part of hospice, but not all palliative care is hospice.

You can get that same stuff as you're pursuing like curative treatments, right?

So it's not like they're going to be like, you're getting curative treatments for cancer.

Sorry, we can't do anything about the nausea.

Then it makes it, it has a place in both of them.

And it has nothing to do with assisting someone and dying.

It has to do with helping them die comfortably when they die naturally.

Yeah.

And, you know, you're not going to get,

you'll get morphine and you'll get like the good stuff

these days.

Morphine Plus, but you're not going to get the cocaine and the liquor.

No, I mean, unless you have a family member who knows somebody.

Yeah, I mean, there's somebody's got a guy, maybe.

Yeah.

Or if you just have like a, you know, pretty

empathic, like really empathic, like on the down low hospice worker.

Right.

And I mean, even if you do score for them, they might not even want it.

Like, I tried to give Yumi's dad a bunch of cocaine.

He's like, no, I'm good with the pain stuff I'm on now.

Yeah.

And then what to do with it, you know?

Hey, look, we found another joke.

Amazing.

So

right before the dark side.

Yeah, because there is a dark side to this.

And again, the one downside to hospice is it puts, it's just the burden on the caregivers.

We'll talk a little bit more about that in a second.

But the kind of generally agreed upon dark side of hospice is that there's such a thing as for-profit hospices.

And contrary to our private equity

theme in our private equity episode, we should say that there are plenty of for-profit

hospices that are perfectly well run.

The people who, the family members who have patients and family dying there, are totally happy, give them great reviews.

Being for-profit as a hospice isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Where they start to get lower marks than other kinds of hospices, specifically nonprofit hospices, is when they are part of a publicly owned corporation, like a hospice went with the IPO at some point.

Yeah, like a chain.

Exactly.

Or, surprisingly,

or not, private equity owns the hospice.

And the reason why it's problematic is because the way that payment is structured has a built-in incentive for for-profit hospices to cut corners and cut costs.

Yeah, there was a survey in 2024 that 25% of hospices in the U.S.

are owned by private equity firms now.

So you can refer to that episode as to exactly what goes into that.

But, you know, I said earlier to put a pin in the payment structure, which is they don't get paid through Medicare.

They don't get paid out per treatment given or for specific treatments given.

It's just this flat fee.

And obviously, if you have a chain, a hospice chain that is for-profit and has gone through the IPO process and has shareholders to answer to,

Very sadly, many times you're going to get hospice centers that

get that flat rate, but they're cutting staff and people are getting the bare minimum treatment required by law.

Right.

And I saw there's a thing where it's supposedly federal regulations say that you have to visit an in-home hospice patient no less than twice a month.

Yeah, just twice a month?

Right.

And then a lot of for-profit hospices

just basically do that minimum.

And if you, most people agree, if you are in some sort of crisis, you're getting more visits.

But if you're not in a crisis, you're getting fewer visits because they need to balance that out to cut costs, right, or keep costs down.

It turns out that's a myth.

The federal government doesn't require two visits a month at minimum.

The federal government doesn't have any requirements for how often or how little a hospice has to visit a patient at home.

They have no requirements or they're not enforcing anything?

They don't have any requirements.

And that's another problem, too.

They don't enforce a lot of the rules that there are.

And there's already a lot of rules that have loopholes.

So this is a system that is just set up for abuse.

Luckily, most of the people who run hospice companies,

they're not in it to abuse the system.

They're in it to help people.

But

there is a place for bad actors to milk the system, overcharge.

Like apparently, it's extremely complex, but there are ways that you can charge more than the flat rate per day.

And I guess a study from, I think, 2021 in the Journal of Geriatric Care, I think,

found that for-profit hospices tend to charge Medicare 34% more than nonprofit hospices.

There's just a lot of stuff you can do.

to game the system.

Yeah.

And, you know, to be clear, hospice in general gets good marks from people.

Even for-profit hospices generally get good marks from people.

But they've drilled down and they found the ones that get the lowest ratings for care are the ones that are publicly traded corporations and owned and or owned by private equity firms.

So

do your research if you're getting into this because there's there are all, like we said, there's 5,700 of them in the U.S.

And hopefully there there is one near you that will take care of you a little bit better.

To remain on hospice, there's also all kinds of rules as far as what's called live discharge.

Right.

You have to demonstrate ongoing steady decline

at recertification intervals every 90 days for the first six months, then every 60 days after until death or discharge.

And discharge is basically exactly what it sounds like.

You're discharged, like you're discharged at a hospital.

It may be because you want to try, you know, curative care again, which is, which is great and you're right.

It could be because of an emergency that you have to go to the hospital for, which will boot you off, which really stinks.

But there are guidelines about discharge and not all of them seem fair.

Yeah, and you can imagine if you're dying of a terminal illness, being moved from a hospice to a hospital.

to continue treatment, maybe home where you have a bunch of emergency room visits ahead of you because your symptoms are going to flare up.

It's not a comfortable thing to be discharged from one place to another.

It's also a huge burden on the family too, because again, the care is being transferred from medical professionals to the family.

But also the whole premise of it is just faulty because not all diseases follow the same trajectory in the decline of the person, and yet they're all held to the same standard, which is essentially the standard that cancer creates a decline in a patient too.

So essentially just saying if you have a terminal illness that's certified by doctors, that doctors recertify, say, every 60 days, you don't have to face a live discharge.

Like you can stay in hospice until you die.

Your death doesn't have to cooperate with federal guidelines.

That would be a huge change and a really simple one to hospice rules.

But apparently that is not, that's not happening right now.

Yeah.

And even if, you know,

you aren't moved home, let's say, let's say you move to a different facility, because there definitely is a problem with

not having enough beds at different places.

And

the family can get ideally into a routine at least.

And they kind of figure it out.

And then with Emily's grandmother, it seemed like once everyone got into the routine and everything had kind of been figured out, then all of a sudden some change would happen where Mary would have to go somewhere else.

And then all of a sudden it's

new visiting hours.

It's in a different place and everyone, and that's just on the family, of course, just like you mentioned, the move for the patient is really burdensome.

So

there's still so much they can do, I think, to clean this whole system up, you know.

For sure.

And even, Chuck, if they're not inpatient, just at home,

hospice basically overlays the support structure.

for you, the hospice patient, in your home, right?

So you have like medical equipment, you have medications that are like delivered to you at times.

If you need a walker, you got a walker.

Just all of this support, like you've got bereavement counselors dropping by, you have a social worker you're doing telehealth visits with.

Like all that just stops.

When you're discharged from hospice alive, they come and they take the medical equipment.

They take your walker away.

You stop getting your medications delivered to you.

You might not even have those prescriptions any longer after that.

If they were prescribed by the hospice doctor,

it's a really really bad jam.

And the other thing about it, too, that Medicare is often taken to task for is they don't really pay enough for in-home hospice.

Like that's the lowest

pay rating, I guess, is in-home non-crisis hospice care.

And that means that if you are

trying to stay at home, You either have to have a bunch of family members who are willing to commit their lives to taking care of you in your final days, or you have to have a bunch of money to pay somebody to do that same thing.

And if you don't and you want to die at home, you're SOL because you have nobody to take care of you at home because there's not enough pay to pay people in hospice to come by and not enough volunteers to take care of you,

take care of your needs on a regular basis.

You know, Grandma Mary.

former foremost general in the Stuff You Should Know Army,

had a t-shirt that says, You can take my walker when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

That's all.

I would love that, dude.

Oh my God, that would be such a great t-shirt.

We got to get that one up.

Can you imagine taking a walker from somebody?

Like, for that, that's your job.

Like, you're the person that you're like, yeah, go over to

Grandma Mary's house and take her stuff.

I know.

It couldn't even be the person who also delivers it because it's such a mean job that there has to just be one specialist who doesn't like anybody who just goes around to houses and takes the medical equipment back.

Yeah.

send Ronnie.

You got anything else?

No, I have nothing else.

Hopefully this serves some people.

And, you know, just look around and do your homework and see if you can find a place that works for you and your family.

Yeah.

And another good piece of advice is to do that sooner than later.

Like

share your wishes with your family.

Maybe even go so far as to create a living will or some sort of medical document saying like, I do want to go into hospice.

I want to stop curative treatment at some point.

and then yeah do like read reviews like just find out who you would go to if it starts to seem like that might be a possibility coming down the the pike yeah oh man my god get a living will i don't care how old you are that's it's very easy thing to do and it's uh that and a will are the two biggest gifts you can give your family as you grow old that's right you want to impress your parents and you're seven Start thinking about a living will.

Start talking about a living will to your parents and they will just be blown blown away.

Totally.

That seems like something in a TV show about a precocious kid.

Yeah, for sure.

Like Alex P.

Keaton, he would do that.

Yeah, exactly.

Hey, you know he had one.

So before we finish, I just also want to give a huge shout out to Yumi's dad's hospice doctor, Dr.

Pajari,

who did not have any sort of ego and was totally willing to listen to Yumi and helped.

get her dad out of hospice too.

So I love it.

Shout out Dr.

Pajari.

And since I shouted out Dr.

Pajari, as was foretold by the runes in 2008, I've just unlocked listener mail.

This is Gen Z Stare Speaks Back.

I have three emails I'm going to try and sort of hit the highlights of because

we got what I felt like was three really sort of legitimate answers as to what the Gen Z stare is all about that

that now I understand.

You know, it may not be my jam, but like it doesn't need to be my jam because i don't have to put my gen x stuff onto gen z that's true uh hey guys 22 years old gen z very much in the gen z stare era uh i work in customer service which is where i use it the most

but uh we were raised with if you have nothing nice to say don't say anything at all so hence staring uh so i guess they took that very much literally yeah um it's not something just done to adults either and this person uh points out that they do it for their friends as far as the phone call no one calls us when they do, it's a spam call, which I was always told the double hello people.

I didn't know that was a thing.

When they answer the phone, it cues the robot.

Did you know that?

Yes.

Okay, I didn't know that.

So I just answer and sit in silence until the awkward is this Josie follows.

And that is from Josie Boozer.

This is another one.

Hey guys, Gen Z person.

I think the explanation you're probably looking for is a lot of Gen Z are using it to

are used used to being interrupted, not

taken seriously, or have our responses to stories be given a weird look.

The example of where someone finishes a story and the person just standing there can either be, one, I don't have anything interesting to say about that story and I don't want to make something up.

Two, I'm so used to having my opinions not taken seriously that I'm just not even going to bother responding.

Many of us are socially awkward and have trouble creating small talk with people that aren't close to us.

Another reason may be because most of our conversations are online and have been online

as we aged and many people will give an emoji reaction to a long story

or just get a smile and that's cool in response.

That is from Sam.

Okay.

So it's kind of tracking along the same lines.

Right.

And then this is from Catherine

who's been listening for five years as a 23 year old.

I've heard people blame the pandemic, but I don't think it fully explains the generational trend since we all live through the same period.

I think there are two main causes.

First, my generation has spent much more time in front of a screen than any previous generations did.

We've grown used to one-sided content consumption.

You would look crazy if you responded to a YouTube video the way you would a phone call or an in-person conversation.

So we're a little out of practice with responding to prompts instead of just watching something.

This all makes total sense.

It totally does.

And then secondly, Gen Z seems to be more likely than previous generations to forego the fake politeness that used to be expected in conversations.

I think this is partially because we're constantly inundated with advertisements.

We become highly sensitive to fake niceness because someone is trying to manipulate our emotions at every turn and sell us something.

My generation seems much more likely to prefer genuine reactions, even if they're negative, because when we're online, that's the only way to know that something is not an ad.

Woo!

Man, this is something else, huh?

Yeah, those are deep.

From Josie, Sam, and Catherine, right?

Yeah, and I think they all sort of track along the same lines, and that explains a lot.

So,

yeah, if a Gen Z person is just staring at you,

maybe they think you're a real jerk and just don't want to say anything.

Right.

They assume you're manipulating them right then.

Yeah, or the other reasons mentioned.

I think they're all valid in their own generational way.

I feel like that really explains the discomfort that people like, say, from Gen X get when we're treated like that because we are used to fake niceness.

I know.

You know, and like we're willing to go along with that kind of thing just to keep from a situation being uncomfortable.

Yeah.

Also, though, quick tip,

if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.

I recently went through an experience with a tattoo artist

getting my

tattoo covered up with my dogs.

And this guy did a,

I appreciate it.

He did a great job.

But

he, let's just say we weren't the same kind of person.

He had a lot of interesting theories on

things.

And here's a little tip to my Gen Z friends.

You don't have to not say anything.

Just keep nodding and go, interesting.

Oh, yeah.

I did that over and over and over for hours.

It goes a long way.

Yeah.

Interesting.

And sure.

Well, no, I don't even know if I am lying.

It was interesting.

Yeah,

just not for me.

Right, exactly.

Maybe the tone was a lie.

Maybe so.

The guy did do an amazing job.

You said he did it like freehand, too, right?

Oh, yeah.

I'll put pictures up at Chuck the Podcaster.

He's a sort of amazing artistic dude.

Yep.

Just like looking at pictures of dogs and drawing them on my arm.

It wasn't like stenciled out on my arm first.

It's nuts, man.

Well, thanks a lot again to Josie, Sam, and Catherine for explaining that to us.

You guys did a knockout job and we appreciate it.

And I'm not being fake nice right now, I'm being quite legitimate and serious and genuine.

If you want to get in touch with us and tell us about your generation, we love hearing that kind of stuff.

You can send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Sami Gente, it's Ana Ortiz.

And I'm Mark and Delicato.

Might know us as Hilda and Justin from Ugly Betty.

Welcome to our new podcast, Viva Betty.

We're re-watching the series from start to finish.

And talking to iconic guests like Betty herself, America Ferreira.

There was this moment when the glasses went on and it was like, this is our Betty.

Listen to Viva Betty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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