Nixon Advocates Hospice Funding

Attorney General Jay Nixon is calling for the state to begin providing some funding for hospice care. He says hospice operations save the state healthcare system millions of dollars a year—although nobody is certain how many millions it saves. Nixon has told the second statewide summit on end of life issues that hospice is an underevalued part of the Missouri healthcare system. He says those who have moved family members out of hospitals are saving the system hundreds of dollars a day. Nixon says many rural areas have only informal systems that are, for all intents and purposes, a telephone tree of friends, relatives and church members. He wants to see the hospice system formalized so a determination can be made of how much money it saves in state healthcare costs, something that he thinks could encourage the legislature to put state funding into those hospice programs.