The Trump Administration believes that caring for babies is so important that employers should give their parents up to six weeks of paid leave. It apparently doesn’t believe it is as important, or as disruptive to work life, to care for aging parents or other relatives in need of personal assistance. That, at least, is the message it is sending [...]
Americans age 40 and older continued to be flummoxed by the challenges of long-term care financing, but increasingly believe that Medicare ought to provide such supports and services. According to a new poll by the Associated Press-University of Chicago NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (AP-NORC), support for a Medicare long-term care benefit has grown significantly over the past five [...]
The best that can be said about President Trump’s 2018 budget and older adults: It could have been worse. In a fiscal plan focused on historic domestic spending cuts, programs for older adults were hit by substantial reductions, though not slashed as deeply as other domestic programs. Medicare was largely untouched. So was Social Security for seniors, although Trump would [...]
The House-passed health bill could further batter the already-beaten down market for long-term care insurance. And drive even more middle income seniors into impoverishment and onto Medicaid long-term care. Here’s why: The House bill, called the American Health Care Act (AHCA) would significantly raise health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket medical costs for buyers aged 50-64. And that is exactly the [...]
Congress and President Trump took dead aim at seniors and younger people with disabilities this week. First, Congress voted to cut or freeze funding for key federal senior service programs. Then the House passed its bill to replace the Affordable Care Act—a measure that would make health insurance unaffordable for many people aged 50-64, allow insurance companies to sell policies [...]
Congressional Republicans seem once again stymied in their efforts to “repeal and replace Obamacare.” So here is a partial solution that can be a winner for both political parties, the insurance industry, and consumers: Allow people 55-64 to buy into Medicare. And enhance the deal by letting Medicare Advantage plans offer some long-term supports and services, such as personal care, [...]
Older adults are among the biggest victims of our often disorganized, uncoordinated, and impersonal system of medical care. Backwards financial incentives encourage useless tests and dangerous hospital admissions and discourage important social support, personal assistance, and preventive care. The result is that Medicare pays hundreds of billions of dollars for treatment that not only fails to improve the quality of [...]
About four in 10 family caregivers are men—sons, husbands, brothers, sons-in-law, or neighbors. We are nearly always ignored in discussions about caregiving, lost in the stereotype of the family caregiver as a 40-something daughter. Finally, AARP is shining a much-needed spotlight on these men. A new study by Jean Accius at AARP’s Public Policy Institute paints a valuable, and rare, [...]
The way you pay for long-term care insurance policies may be about to change in a big way. Genworth, the biggest seller of stand-alone long-term care insurance, is about to ask state insurance regulators for permission to fundamentally revise the way it structures premiums. Instead of holding premiums flat for several years followed by big double-digit rate hikes, it wants [...]
Medicare is a critical lifeline for older adults who need health care as they age. But a new study shows that over the next two decades, out-of-pocket medical costs for older adults are likely to rise significantly, even with access to Medicare. By 2035, a typical senior will spend one out of every seven dollars of retirement income on medical [...]