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Palliative care, plainly
Palliative care is not hospice. The Center to Advance Palliative Care defines it as specialised medical care for people living with a serious illness, focused on relief from the symptoms and stress of the illness, and says it is appropriate at any age and any stage and can be given alongside curative treatment. Hospice is a separate Medicare benefit with its own eligibility rules: Part A, a certification of a life expectancy of six months or less, and accepting comfort care instead of treatment intended to cure the terminal illness.[2]
What the team does
CAPC describes a specially trained team of doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains and other specialists, treating pain, depression, shortness of breath, fatigue, constipation, nausea, loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping and anxiety.[1]
In practice a palliative team also does the coordinating work nobody else has time for: making sense of what several specialists are each doing, and running the conversation where the goals get said out loud. That is often where an advance directive stops being paperwork. We are describing what these teams do rather than citing a study that measured it.
The trial people cite, and what it actually showed
Temel and colleagues randomised 151 ambulatory patients with newly diagnosed metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer to early palliative care integrated with standard oncology care, or to standard oncology care alone. At 12 weeks the early-palliative-care group had better quality of life (mean FACT-L 98.0 against 91.5, P=0.03) and fewer had depressive symptoms (16% against 38%, P=0.01). Fewer received aggressive end-of-life care (33% against 54%, P=0.05), and median survival was longer — 11.6 months against 8.9, P=0.02.[3] That difference of 2.7 months is the number everyone quotes.
Hold it at its real size. One disease, one cancer centre, 151 patients, published in 2010, with early specialist involvement as the intervention. It does not establish that palliative care extends survival in other illnesses, or that any particular local programme will reproduce it. What it does show is that comfort care and life-extending care were not opposites in this trial — which is enough to make the referral worth asking for.
An earlier version of this page also said oncology guidelines recommend referral within about eight weeks of an advanced-cancer diagnosis, and that 2024 trial evidence found telehealth palliative care works as well as in-person. We could not verify either in this pass, so both are out until we can.
Getting it, and the money question
Ask the treating doctor: "can we have a palliative care referral?" Families usually have to raise it first.
CAPC says more than 1,700 hospitals with 50 or more beds have a palliative care team.[1] Outpatient clinics, home-based programmes and telehealth exist too, unevenly. Availability is local, so ask the treating clinician what is actually within reach.
On paying for it, we have corrected this page. It previously said Medicare Part B, Medicaid and most insurance cover palliative care like ordinary specialist care. Part B does cover medically necessary physician and outpatient services, but that is not the same as a palliative-care benefit with predictable cost-sharing, and the Medicare pages we checked do not establish one.[4] Palliative care is delivered in too many different arrangements — hospital consult, clinic, home programme, a service inside a Medicare Advantage plan — for one answer to hold.
So ask two questions instead of assuming: ask the palliative programme how it bills, and ask your own plan what it covers — Original Medicare, a Medicare Advantage plan, Medicaid or private insurance. Get it before the first visit, not after.
The provider directory is at getpalliativecare.org/provider-directory.
Who helps you locally, free. Your Area Agency on Aging gives free options counseling. Reach any of them through the federal Eldercare Locator at 1-800-677-1116 or eldercare.acl.gov (Administration for Community Living).[5] More on the four people who help on Who helps me locally.
Quick answers
What is the difference between palliative care and hospice?
Palliative care, as the Center to Advance Palliative Care defines it, is specialised medical care for people living with a serious illness, focused on relief from the symptoms and stress of that illness. CAPC says it "is appropriate at any age and at any stage in a serious illness, and it can be provided along with curative treatment." Medicare hospice is a specific benefit with its own conditions: Part A, a certification of six months or less, and accepting comfort care instead of treatment intended to cure the terminal illness. So hospice has eligibility rules and an election; palliative care does not work that way. [1, 2]
Does palliative care mean giving up on treatment?
No — CAPC's own definition says it can be provided along with curative treatment. In one randomised trial of 151 patients with newly diagnosed metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer, those given early palliative care alongside standard oncology care had better quality-of-life scores at 12 weeks (98.0 against 91.5 on the FACT-L scale), fewer depressive symptoms (16% against 38%), less aggressive end-of-life care (33% against 54%) and longer median survival (11.6 months against 8.9). That is one disease in one setting, not a promise for every illness. [1, 3]
How do you get palliative care and does Medicare cover it?
Ask the treating doctor for a referral; families usually have to raise it. CAPC says more than 1,700 hospitals with 50 or more beds have a palliative care team, and outpatient, home-based and telehealth programmes also exist. On money, do not rely on a blanket answer: ask the palliative programme how it bills and ask your own plan what it covers, because arrangements differ by setting and by plan. An earlier version of this page said Medicare Part B covers it like any specialist, and we could not support that. [1, 4]
Sources and what they support
Sources checked 2026-09-19 using AI-assisted editorial research. This is a source check, not a clinical review.
- Center to Advance Palliative Care, about palliative care. Supports the definition quoted here, that it is appropriate at any age and any stage and can be provided along with curative treatment, the composition of the team, the list of symptoms treated, and the figure of more than 1,700 hospitals with 50 or more beds having a palliative care team. CAPC is the specialty's own professional centre, not a payer, so nothing here establishes what any plan covers. Its hospital figure is a count, not a percentage; an earlier version of this page gave 72% of hospitals with 50+ beds, which we could not verify. This page does not compare palliative care with hospice.
- Medicare, hospice care coverage. Supports the hospice side of the comparison: the Part A requirement, certification of a life expectancy of six months or less, and accepting comfort care instead of treatment intended to cure the terminal illness. Cited here only to mark the boundary between the two; the hospice page sets out the benefit properly.
- Temel JS, Greer JA, Muzikansky A, et al. Early Palliative Care for Patients with Metastatic Non–Small-Cell Lung Cancer. N Engl J Med 2010;363:733–742. Supports every figure quoted: 151 patients randomised, FACT-L 98.0 against 91.5 (P=0.03), depressive symptoms 16% against 38% (P=0.01), aggressive end-of-life care 33% against 54% (P=0.05), and median survival 11.6 against 8.9 months (P=0.02). The population is ambulatory patients with newly diagnosed metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer at a single centre, and the primary outcome was change in quality of life at 12 weeks — survival was a secondary finding. It does not establish a survival benefit in other diseases or from other models of palliative care.
- Medicare, the parts of Medicare. Supports what Part B covers in general terms — medically necessary physician and outpatient services. It is cited here for what it does not establish: there is no palliative-care benefit with uniform coverage or cost-sharing described on Medicare's own pages, which is why this page now tells you to ask the programme and your plan instead of promising Part B coverage.
- Administration for Community Living, Eldercare Locator. Supports the referral route to a local Area Agency on Aging. It does not arrange medical referrals.
Removed in this pass, for want of a source: that Medicare Part B, Medicaid and most insurance cover palliative care like ordinary specialist care; that about 72% of US hospitals with 50+ beds have palliative teams; that oncology guidelines recommend referral within about eight weeks of an advanced-cancer diagnosis; and that 2024 trial evidence found telehealth palliative care works as well as in-person.