Yes and no. You can "quit" hospice any time you want . . . or so they say. Medicare will only pay for you to go to the hospital, if that is to treat something unrelated to the diagnosis that got you into hospice. Arguing that something is unrelated can get problematic. But it could happen. Like - say you're in hospice because you have incurable lung cancer. Now - say you burn your hand in the kitchen and it gets badly infected. Medicare might well pay for you to be in the hospital for that.

Those type of scenarios are not common. In an elderly person with deteriorating health, everything tends to be related. This is more like "death panels" than you realize. We do spend an enormous amount of money on hospital care during the last few months of older people's lives. It does make sense to question the utility and the wisdom of that. (Part of the problem is that hospital care is so ridiculously costly in this country, which could potentially be changed by socializing the way we finance it, as every single other modern nation does.) Medicare is desperately seeking to reduce what gets spent on elders during the last year or so of their lives. I agree with that goal. As a society, we have other things we need to spend money on. Hospice was supposed to be a way to get people to not suck up so much costly attention, when they are likely soon going to die anyway.

When the medical teams at hospitals see an elder coming back repeatedly with expensive problems that can only be helped temporarily, they start thinking, "Maybe we ought to stop trying so hard to save this person." And they do have a point. That's the reality. "Death panel" is not an elegant way to describe that. But you are talking about a group of people reaching a consensus of informed opinion that Aunt Mable needs to go to her eternal reward, sooner rather than later. Call it what you will.