Congress funds palliative care workforce—expanding end-of-life options.
S. 2287 — Palliative Care and Hospice Education and Training Act · Filed by Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) · 23 cosponsors · Introduced Jul 15, 2025 · Hearing held
Your members of Congress
Enter a ZIP to see where your representative and both senators stood on this bill.
Looked up on this device — your ZIP is never stored on our servers.
What it does
This bill authorizes $20 million annually (2026–2030) to fund palliative care and hospice education programs in medical schools, nursing schools, and allied health professions. It creates grants for faculty training, career development awards for junior faculty specialists, fellowship programs for practicing clinicians, and student loan-repayment-style incentives for advanced-degree students entering palliative care. It also directs the NIH to expand palliative care research and requires federal agencies to disseminate public information about palliative care benefits. The bill does not change who can receive palliative care or restrict end-of-life options—it simply funds workforce development and public education.
Why we flagged it
The bill's operative mechanism is straightforward: federal grants to accredited educational institutions to train more palliative care specialists across multiple disciplines. It is a classic workforce-development bill with no hidden carve-outs, no liability shields, and no private-sector giveaways.
What the text implies
- Section 5(b) explicitly clarifies that palliative care under this bill is NOT for hastening death—a safeguard against misuse, but also a signal that the bill's sponsors anticipated political controversy over end-of-life care and wanted to preempt it.
- The bill prioritizes rural, underserved, and minority populations in grant awards, which may increase equity in access to palliative care but also signals that current distribution is unequal.
- NIH research expansion (Section 6) may eventually shift clinical practice toward earlier palliative care integration, changing how oncologists and other specialists approach serious illness—a long-term cultural shift in medicine.
Section numbers refer to the bill text the analysis read — linked under Primary records below.
Who it affects
Ordinary people benefit from expanded access to trained palliative care professionals, better public information about end-of-life options, and research into quality-of-life care for serious illness. The bill does not restrict any citizen rights, impose costs on patients, or create liability shields. It is a straightforward public health workforce investment.
Who stands to gain
- accredited medical schools (allopathic and osteopathic)
- nursing schools
- allied health education programs (social work, physician assistant, chaplaincy, pharmacy, psychology
- teaching hospitals and graduate medical education programs
- health care facilities and hospice organizations (as training sites)
Named in the bill
Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Department of Veterans Affairs, Administration on Aging, Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, American Board of Medical Specialties, American Osteopathic Association
Where it stands
23 cosponsors: 12 Republicans, 10 Democrats, 1 Independents.
- Jul 15, 2025 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in Senate”
- Jul 15, 2025 — Referred to Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions · Congress.gov: “Read twice and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions”
- Mar 19, 2026 — Hearing held · Congress.gov: “Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Hearings held”
Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.
Money around this bill
7 lobbying clients named this bill on 8 disclosure filings across 2 quarters, Dec 2025 to Jun 2026. Those filings disclosed $3,270,651 in lobbying spend. A filing names 14 bills on average, so that figure is what each filing reported, not a share belonging to this bill.
More lobbying clients named this bill than 86% of bills with at least one filing.
Tammy Baldwin, the sponsor, reported $195,336 in PAC receipts in the 2026 cycle.
- Alzheimer's Association — $1,800,000 on 1 filing
- National Alliance for Care at Home (formerly Natl Assn for Home Care & Hospice) — $610,000 on 1 filing
- American Heart Association — $400,000 on 1 filing
- Catholic Health Association of the United States — $240,651 on 1 filing
- American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine — $100,000 on 1 filing
Lobbying Disclosure Act filings through Jul 20, 2026. A filing shows who paid to lobby on a bill it names, not what changed.
How this was measured
Analysis — Quorum's AI read the bill text published by Congress.gov (23,113 characters) on May 4, 2026. Section numbers in the findings refer to that text, linked below; transparency and hidden-provision scores are compared against the median of 16,222 analysed bills.
Status and sponsors — Congress.gov's bill record — actions, committee referrals and cosponsors — loaded nightly. The timeline shows status changes, not every procedural action.
Money — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings whose specific-issue field names this bill for quarters ending Dec 2025 to Jun 2026. A filing's amount is reported whole beside the median number of bills a filing names; it is never divided across them. PAC receipts are FEC-reported contributions to the sponsor's candidate committee in the 2026 cycle.
As of — lobbying records through Jul 20, 2026 · page rendered 2026-10-20.
“Congress funds palliative care workforce—expanding end-of-life options.” QuorumCivic. https://share.quorumcivic.app/bill/119/s2287 Report an error
The week in bills
One email, Sunday: what Congress passed, what it changed, and who paid.
One link arrives to confirm the address. It is used for this email and nothing else, and every issue carries an unsubscribe link.