Compassionate Care Act

Key Points

• The bill funds a national multi-year public education campaign to teach people about advance directives, living wills, and their right to direct their own medical care.
• Medicare's temporary pandemic-era rule allowing video visits before hospice recertification would become permanent, and geographic limits on telehealth for advance care planning would be removed.
• A new grant pilot program would require participating medical, nursing, and social work schools to add hands-on training in end-of-life conversations and palliative care to their degree programs.
• The government would study how to create a national, uniform advance directive policy so documents like living wills work consistently no matter which state a patient is in.
• GAO would study whether a national registry for advance directives is feasible, taking patient privacy laws into account.