Don't give me too much credit. The old lady, a lifelong friend of my Mom's, is in a nursing home in south suburban Chicago. I'm in Florida, of course. She obviously doesn't get a lot of my personal attention. Beyond that, her dementia has reached the stage that's she's forgotten who I am anyway.

But her "graduation" from hospice back to normal nursing home care was actually the result of Medicare, which indicated that it would stop covering the cost of hospice care after she survived for six months, was gaining weight, showing no ill effects of her tumor, etc. So in this case, Medicare can at least be credited with paying attention to her condition and "kicking her out" of hospice, where she would get no life-prolonging care, back into the general population where she would get treatment for the various ills that would confront her.