(National Catholic Register) – Many Catholic families can testify to the positive experiences they’ve had with hospice programs that cared for loved ones in their final days with dignity and compassion.
But recent news reports about rampant fraud have cast hospice in a different light. In June, for example, federal authorities charged the operator of multiple Los Angeles hospice businesses, along with a group of alleged accomplices, with a $27-million fraud scheme that involved stealing the identities of dead people and billing the government for phony healthcare services, using the proceeds to pay for luxury items including lease payments on a Rolls-Royce Phantom sedan that costs more than $500,000.
“Can you imagine anything more low than to pretend you’re taking care of dying people when you’re not?” said Wesley J. Smith, chair and senior fellow at the Center on Human Exceptionalism, a bioethics and public policy program of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute that focuses on issues of human dignity, liberty and equality. CONTINUE