WBFO's Tom Dinki reports. On Tuesday the House approved the Beneficiary Enrollment Notification and Eligibility Simplification (BENES) Act. It mostly deals with Medicare eligibility, but also includes language from a previous piece of legislation, the Helping Our Senior Population in Comfort Environments (HOSPICE) Act, which lawmakers say would increase the accountability and transparency of hospice providers. Currently, hospices are only inspected once every three years and are not subject to fines. They can be cut off from Medicare funding, but the penalty is rarely used. It happened to less than 1% of the nation’s over 4,000 hospices from 2014 to 2017. Language from the HOSPICE ACT would allow the Department of Health and Human Services level monetary fines on hospices for poor care, publicize their inspection results online, and create a toll-free hotline for patients and families to report abuse.