Establishing the right of the terminally ill to adequate palliative care: the litigation alternative

The Bazelon Center For Mental Health Law in Washington, D.C., has undertaken a palliative care project to examine how litigation might be used to secure the rights of terminally ill patients to receive adequate palliative care, including the medications necessary to relieve the pain that often accompanies a final illness. One area of inquiry is the Medicare Hospice Benefit and the requirement that, to qualify for the benefit, a patient must have a prognosis of 6 months or less to live. A second major area of inquiry is regulatory restrictions on the prescription of opioids for pain relief of terminally ill patients and whether those restrictions improperly impede the physicians in their ability to engage in effective and appropriate pain management.