On Friday, July 1, it will be 50 years since Medicare first began paying health benefits for older adults. It is an anniversary worth celebrating—and easy to forget that prior to Medicare half of all seniors had no insurance. But much has changed in a half century—and Medicare has not kept up. It is time to rethink the program—both the [...]
House Speaker Paul Ryan’s proposed blueprint for health reform would make major changes in medical care for seniors, raising out-of-pocket costs for some and shifting others from traditional Medicare coverage to commercial insurance. His plan, called A Better Way, would slowly raise the age of eligibility for Medicare and cap federal spending for the program, increasing subsidies for low-income seniors [...]
Do you understand Medicare? Of course you don’t. Neither does anybody else. So why would Congress abolish a modest federal program that pays for actual human beings who can explain it to confused consumers? Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee essentially voted to abolish the State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP) by quietly eliminating the entire $52.1 million in federal [...]
What are family caregivers worth? As the credit card commercial says, they are priceless. But they also have a financial value. And calculating that value is important as we consider ways to help them. For example, before Congress creates new government supports for family members who help aging parents or other relatives with disabilities, it will want to know if [...]
Most of us, most of the time, want to age at home. But the reality is not everyone can, or should. Sometimes staying in your own home as you become increasingly frail is a poor choice. It can be lonely and even dangerous. It can burn out family caregivers. And it even can be more costly than other options, especially [...]
Sometimes, you just have to say what is crashingly obvious. And when it comes to older adults aging at home, here it is: If seniors are going to avoid a nursing home, they need a safe, affordable alternative. Without one, they may die prematurely. And even if they live, they will almost surely need institutional care, which may be a [...]
What do family caregivers really do? What is their day like? Remarkably, though there are tens of millions of children, parents, and spouses in the US helping millions of frail older adults and younger people with disabilities, we know very little about their daily experiences. In an effort to better understand what it is like to care for a relative [...]
How much would it cost if government pays for all long-term care? About $4 trillion over the next decade. We know because Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has proposed to do just that, as part of his ambitious Medicare-for-all health insurance program. And, in an effort to calculate the overall cost of Sanders’s domestic policy agenda, a group of my [...]
A new study finds that healthy people who continue to work after age 65 are likely to live longer than those who retire. But many older adults don’t get the chance, too often tossed aside by employers who can’t see past their gray hair. And that got me thinking about major league baseball, now in full swing. Why? Because often [...]
Last year, Congress changed the way Medicare pays physicians, It scrapped a system that paid docs based largely on the number of procedures and tests they do, and instructed federal Medicare officials to come up with a design that rewards quality and value. Medicare has already moved in this direction for hospitals and health systems, and the new law was [...]