March 18, 2026 Washington, DC — A statement from Katie Smith Sloan, president and CEO, LeadingAge, the association of nonprofit providers of aging services, including hospice, on the Hospice Care Accountability, Reform and Enforcement (CARE) Act of 2026, introduced in the House of Representatives on March 17 by Representative Linda Sanchez (D-CA) and Senator Mark Warner (D-VA):
“Hospice is a vital and deeply valued benefit that has a critical role in America’s health care system. At its best, it delivers compassionate, high-quality, person-centered care to beneficiaries and families by ethical, forward-thinking, competent providers–in keeping with the sector’s nonprofit origins, which established a standard of quality care. Currently, however, hospice is at an inflection point. Increased scrutiny–an appropriate response to fraudulent behavior of a limited group of bad actors–highlights the need for modernization.
This moment calls for thoughtful reform to ensure the hospice benefit fully serves patients and families, supports high-quality providers, protects against the rise of dishonest players, and preserves hospice care’s core promise.
Done right, changes will expand the benefit to support the realities of modern-day hospice care, address the benefit’s vulnerabilities now being exploited, and help ensure quality to support strong funding.
The Hospice CARE Act of 2026 is a positive step forward.
We thank Congresswoman Sánchez and Senator Warner for their leadership on this bill, first introduced two years ago. We appreciate their commitment to ensure high quality care for people with serious illnesses and those at the end of life. There is more work to do, and we look forward to continuing to work with Congresswoman Sánchez and Senator Warner to ensure this bill achieves these goals.”
Important aspects of the Hospice CARE Act, Sloan said, are:
- Inclusions: respite care at home; expansions of inpatient hospice options; a payment stream for certain high-cost therapies– all of which we have long advocated for – will, we expect, expand access to and incentivize high quality hospice care.
- Program integrity protections: provisions that will help stop the proliferation of fraudulent providers, help to identify fraud and abuse in a timely manner and preclude illicit business formation by fraudulent providers; ensure better targeting of program-integrity resources, improvements to auditor education and increased transparency into the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) regulatory practices around audits.
- Provisions to be refined or evaluated further: routine home care payment reform, creation of “referring physician” role, the need for a five-year national moratorium as opposed to more targeted efforts, and new mechanisms to monitor unrelated spending are well intentioned policies that need additional revisions or evaluation for impact on our members.
