Ohio lawmakers' bill boosts care for terminally ill kids

STATES NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON -- It's an impossible choice for parents of seriously ill children: Deciding between continuing curative care, which seeks to cure a child's disease, or beginning palliative care, which provides relief to a terminally ill patient by managing the symptoms and pain.
Under a Medicare benefit established in 1982, only a child diagnosed with six months to live or less can access hospice care -- care that is provided 24 hours a day and seven days a week, and can be given in the patient's home, a hospital, nursing home or private facility. Those children in hospice care and their parents must choose between medicines and methods designed to beat their disease, and ones that focus on easing their pain.
Two Ohio lawmakers want Congress to help those children get both. Republican Senator Mike DeWine and Rep. Deborah Pryce, R-Columbus, unveiled legislation Wednesday at a Washington meeting of the National Childhood Cancer Foundation that would create grant programs to expand pediatric palliative care.
"The legislation we're introducing today is a direct result of the experiences we have had together," Pryce said to about 100 families of children who have fought, are fighting, or in some cases, have lost a battle with cancer. Pryce's 9-year-old daughter, Caroline, died of cancer in 1999. "We would give our hearts and souls to not have to be here today. It would be great if kids didn't have any pain, but that's not the case in this world."
Their bill would authorize $5 million in grants for hospitals for training and education in pediatric palliative care, $10 million for the creation of pediatric palliative care programs, $5 million for additional doctors and nurses specializing in pediatric palliative care, $10 million for pain and symptom management research.