Respite care can be provided through an inpatient hospice unit, a hospice house, a nursing home, or an acute care hospital that has dedicated hospice beds. A hospice does not admit a person to an acute care hospital for intensive care. The purpose of an ICU is to save the life of someone who has an illness or an injury that's curable. The ICU is not set up to provide comfort measures, and doctors that frequently practice intensive care medicine often are not well versed in comfort measures. Doctors who specialize in palliative medicine treat people with grave illness aggressively.
Hospice provides comfort measures in ways that most other doctors never learned about.
That's why palliative medicine is a specialty of its own. In the case of hospice, the cost is less than intensive hospital care, but hospice costs more than home health nursing care because more services are provided. If the patient has Medicare, the government has outlined what is available on the Medicare hospice benefit. All medications related to the terminal illness are paid for. This helps people who need high doses of morphine or other opioid drugs to control the rather intense pain that often accompanies the later stages of cancer, AIDS, and other debilitating diseases.