Economics of hospice care.

As an institution providing care for patients who are dying, hospice has expanded significantly since the opening of the first hospice in the United States in 1974. Many changes have occurred in that time, including the maturation of hospices and the introduction of third-party reimbursement under Medicare. This article examines literature on hospice from an economic perspective; the focus is on the characteristics of the hospice "industry," demand for hospice care, hospice as a supplier of care, and the cost of hospice care. Two major gaps in the research are the failure to categorize hospices by the type of reimbursement received and the emphasis on expenditures for care to the exclusion of consideration of the cost of producing hospice care.