The Washington Post published an extensive investigative story on hospice the other day. The take away: Hospices (mostly for-profits) are making big bucks by manipulating their case loads to maximize Medicare payments. In short, they are taking on many patients who are frail but not dying and thus staying on hospice care for a very long time. But the Post [...]
Despite widespread claims that doctors are fleeing Medicare, more than 9 in 10 still accept new Medicare patients and fewer than 1 percent have quit the program. The vast majority of seniors have regular access to a doctor and can find a physician when they need one. And Medicare patients are no more likely than others to have to wait [...]
Despite the fears of consumer advocates and the predictions of many insurance companies, seniors are flocking to Medicare Advantage managed care plans. It shouldn’t be a surprise since premiums for these policies are a fraction of the cost of traditional fee-for-service Medicare. This shift may be one driver of the recent slowdown in the growth of health care costs and [...]
Americans have little idea how long-term supports and services are paid for, according to a new poll by Harris Interactive and the medical publishers HealthDay. Yet, they are worried about the cost, believe most people should buy long-term care insurance, and also favor a new government program to pay some or all of the costs of LTC. It is hard to [...]
Baby Boomers are in serious denial when it comes to their medical and long-term care costs in retirement. Yes, Medicare provides excellent health insurance (subsidized in large part by taxpayers). But it doesn’t come close to paying for a senior’s medical costs. And doesn’t pay for long-term supports and services at all. Those holes in the Medicare system mean a [...]
In the past few weeks, no fewer than three highly respected groups have proposed major health care reforms. They all promise greater use of patient-centered integrated care, but none include supports and services for frail elders or younger people with disabilities. It took four decades to incorporate a drug benefit into Medicare. Now we seem to be in the same place [...]
California has taken the idea of managed care for low-income seniors and people with disabilities to a whole new level. Under an agreement with the Obama Administration announced last week, the state will begin shifting both medical care and long-term supports and services to managed care companies in just seven months. Watch this closely. You may be looking at the [...]
Broad-based, integrated, community-wide initiatives can help keep seniors out of the hospital, says an important new study from the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study, done by a team led by Dr. Joanne Lynn of the Altarum Institute’s Center on Elder Care and Advanced Illness is new evidence that by working together, hospitals, physicians, social workers, nursing homes, [...]
Health policymakers love the idea of hospice. Yet Medicare seems to be learning exactly the wrong lessons from the success of the program, which provides well-integrated patient-centered comfort care to people with terminal illness. Instead of trying to understand why hospice is growing in popularity, Medicare is instead making it harder to enroll. As often happens in its regulation of [...]
In 2012, about 13 million seniors participated in Medicare Advantage (MA) managed care plans—about 27 percent of the Medicare population and twice as many as were enrolled just seven years ago. This rapid shift to managed care by seniors may be just a first step towards a fundamental change in the way Medicare is delivered and financed. And it has the [...]