On Tuesday, voters in Maine will decide whether to create the nation’s first universal public home care benefit for older adults and younger people with disabilities. The hotly debated referendum, Ballot Question 1, would be funded through a surtax on high-income households. The measure was introduced by the Main People’s Alliance and is supported by many progressive and consumer groups. [...]
With great fanfare, and just two weeks before the congressional elections, President Trump announced a new initiative aimed at reducing Medicare drug prices. It is an issue he has been promising to address since his presidential campaign. But a close look shows that the package announced yesterday is quite modest. The plan, which the Department of Health & Human Services [...]
It is Medicare open season. And, let’s face it, nobody has any idea what to do. The other night, I got a call from a friend who works in the long-term care advocacy world. She will soon turn 65 and is confronting the reality of enrolling in Medicare. She has been doing diligent research and creating detailed spreadsheets. And she [...]
You probably have heard the statistic: One-quarter of Medicare spending is for patients in the last year of life. It is cited as a major reason for excessive medical spending in the US and leads to a widely-accepted conclusion: If only we would stop “wasting” dollars on futile care for those who soon will die anyway, we could significantly slow [...]
Earlier this year, Congress and the Trump Administration for the first time allowed Medicare Advantage plans to offer their members non-medical supportive services such as transportation and home meals. As insurers begin to roll out their plans for Medicare’s 2019 open season enrollment, we are starting to see what these new benefits are going to look like. Relatively few plans [...]
Tough new rules proposed by the Trump Administration would make it effectively impossible for immigrants to come to the US to work as home health aides or as staff at nursing homes or assisted living facilities. Because at least one million aides (one of every four) is an immigrant, the complex rules Trump proposed over the weekend would dry up [...]
We’ve known for years that good transitional care programs—services aimed at helping patients make the move from a hospital or skilled nursing facility (SNF) back home, or even from a hospital to a SNF, can improve the health of older adults and save money. But a new study finds that even through Medicare recently began paying physicians extra for providing [...]
What do Hurricane Florence and frail old age have in common? Millions of people know they are coming yet won’t do anything to protect themselves against a high-risk threat. Several recent news items put this in focus. And all of them point in the same direction: Americans are unable to plan for a catastrophe, even one we know is coming. [...]
Last week, Microsoft announced it will require its vendors to provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents. Nice thought, but the tech giant missed an important opportunity. By limiting the required benefit only to new parents, it is ignoring the needs of workers caring for spouses, siblings, or aging parents. In some respects that’s not surprising. [...]
Mom falls and breaks her hip. Her injury is repaired at the local acute care hospital but she needs intensive rehab and post-surgical care. She could be sent home or to a skilled nursing facility (SNF) but instead she is discharged to a long-term care hospital (LTCH)—a facility that specializes in intensive post-acute services. But a new study, published by [...]