Hospice Action Network - Expanding Access to Palliative Care Act (S.2565)

Palliative care is patient and family-centered support that optimizes quality of life by anticipating, preventing, and treating suffering. Palliative care throughout the continuum of illness involves addressing physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual needs and to facilitate patient autonomy, access to information and choice. 

Right now, Medicare beneficiaries are in need, because they cannot access home-based palliative care. This means that patients and families miss out on the wealth of resources and support that palliative care providers can offer.  

To address these needs, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization and the Hospice Action Network have been leading efforts to expand access to palliative care across the country.  

We support the Expanding Access to Palliative Care Act (S. 2565), which would direct the Innovation Center at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) to implement a Community-Based Palliative Care Demonstration.  

Access to palliative care where a patient calls home will improve patients' quality of life, allowing patients and families to spend more time together, and less time in doctors' offices and emergency rooms. It will also protect medically vulnerable people from unnecessary exposure to COVID-19 and other illnesses.  

Click Here to call on your Senators to support the Expanding Access to palliative Care Act!