News Release

Ground-breaking End-of-Life Care Financing Report Published

January 7, 2003

Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care recently released its newest monograph, "Financial Implications of Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care," featuring six innovative demonstration projects that successfully provide concurrent life-extending and palliative care for patients with chronic and life-limiting illnesses. These projects not only demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and its acceptability to patients and clinicians; they also show its potential for containing costs. The monograph complements a Policy Directions Forum held in Washington on September 9, 2002 co-sponsored by Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). The theme of the day was a call to Congress to implement larger, regional, population-based demonstration projects to validate the findings of these small innovative programs.

Find this ground-breaking monograph, its executive summary and reports on the Policy Forum at: http://www.promotingexcellence.org/finance/.

Other Significant Finance Papers to be Released
"Financial Implications of Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care" is the first in three significant finance papers to be released by National Program Offices of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Last Acts Finance Committee continues to examine systems that pay for end-of-life care with its release this month of two papers. "Medicare and End-of-Life Care" looks at Medicare's role in facilitating access to end-of-life care for hospice and non-hospice beneficiaries. Marilyn Moon and Cristina Boccuti of The Urban Institute describe and discuss the end-of-life benefits covered and the payment systems used for different provider types, as they relate to end-of-life care, and note potential areas of improvement. In "Private Insurance and End-of-Life Care," Mark Merlis brings together what is known about end-of-life care under private insurance to identify key issues for policymakers and researchers. It highlights efforts by insurers to improve access to palliative care, considers why insurers have not been more active in this area and offers some preliminary suggestions for promoting change.

To order a copy of these papers, send an e-mail to lastacts@aol.com or visit the Last Acts Web site at: http://www.lastacts.org.

For more information contact Karyn Collins at karyn.collins@mso.umt.edu or 406.243.6668.

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Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care was a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation dedicated to long-term changes in health care institutions to substantially improve care for dying people and their families.