She says this is where the distinction between palliative care and hospice becomes important.

Hospice care has been around the United States since the 70s, and there's a lot of stereotypes and myths that accompany it, including ideas like hospice is just quitting.

And the way our Medicare hospice benefit is set up, you have to relinquish what's called curative care, care intended to try to treat the underlying condition in order to get a hospice benefit.

So in health services circles, we call that the terrible choice.

And it's this trade-off where you have to have one or the other.

Now, palliative care is a broad umbrella that encompasses hospice care, but a lot of other things too.

So palliative care is focused on symptom management.

MedPAC, which advises Congress on Medicare, found that the median lifetime hospice stay among Medicare patients who died in 2024 was just 19 days.

Take a little time also if you could just talk about the differences between palliative and hospice, and a little bit of what you were mentioning there about, you know, when things are allowed and then sort of in the current healthcare system when they have to stop and, and, and what some of those different options are.

Mm-hmm.

I think this is so important because palliative care is a really powerful tool for people in these situations, but I think we just lack information, and then stereotypes and myths around hospice just sort of overshadow the entire thing.

So hospice, like I said, is this Medicare-covered benefit.

Hospice came to the United States in the '70s, so we've had it around for a good 50 years.

Lots of time for it to get sort of entrenched.

Now, hospice usage has climbed.

So take us a little bit down that path of, uh, you know, we, we should not all be, we should not be waiting as long as most of us do to have these conversations.

And then at what age do we really start to need to think about this stuff?

So the second question first, like the age part of it is it's really easy to think of this as something that you don't need to mess with until you're really old or you have a serious illness.

And, I think that we should all be talking about it like today.

It affects younger people all the time.

So one in four people in the United States is a caregiver, and youth caregiving is completely on the rise.

So even if it's not your end of life, you could be pulled into caregiving situations, which are very challenging.

So I think it's never too early or too young to be thinking about this.

So how can we get good end-of-life care without going broke?