Margaret Overton, MD joins the Late Night Health Show to talk about Greed in the Hospice Industry and how services have changed in the last 10 years!

While tending to patients as well as her aging parents as both a doctor and a daughter, Margaret Overton realized something about end of life care: dying well requires more than just good medical care.

In her new book Hope for a Cool Pillow (Outpost19, March 1, 2016, Paperback Original), Dr. Overton alternates chapters discussing her patients, her experience with her parents and her time at Harvard Business School’s course on healthcare management, which she took after realizing that our plan for dying well in this country is broken. She wanted to do research on how to fix it for her family as well as for her patients.

Checking in with Mark Alyn on Late Night Health, Dr. Overton can talk listeners through advanced directives and DNRs – which can can be a scary and uncomfortable conversation, but it doesn’t have to be. Dr. Overton’s Hope for a Cool Pillow provides both factual and emotional frameworks to broach this subject with your loved ones. She can talk about profit vs. non profit hospice, what the differences are, and what makes the most sense for you and your family. Finding hospice and palliative care is not only a practical decision for a family: it is a sustainability issue for our society as well.

Nuanced and full of compassion, Hope for a Cool Pillow has humor as well as a strong, impassioned argument about how end of life care can be less fraught for people all over the US.