While there is no chance the federal government will enact long-term care financing reform any time soon, several states are busy developing public insurance programs of their own. These initiatives could be a critical step as the nation wrestles with how to pay for personal care for older adults and others with disabilities or chronic disease. Washington State is refining [...]
Rep Tom Suozzi (D-NY) has introduced a bill to create a public, catastrophic, long-term care insurance program. The monthly cash benefit, initially about $3,600 and indexed for inflation, would be funded with a modest increase in the payroll tax of 0.3 percent for workers and 0.3 percent for employers, or roughly $300-a-year for a median wage worker. For many older [...]
Recent articles in the journal Health Affairs attempted to attach numbers to a problem that millions of American families are intimately aware of: Many middle-income older adults cannot afford to pay their out-of-pocket costs for health care and senior housing. And the problem is going to get worse once the Baby Boomers begin to hit their late 70s and early [...]
Representative Frank Pallone (D-NJ), the senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is proposing a new universal Medicare long-term care benefit. His bill, still in draft form, initially would provide a daily cash benefit of about $100 after a two-year waiting period. As an alternative to the waiting period, Pallone is also considering a cash deductible that would [...]
Two years ago, the Long-Term Care Financing Collaborative proposed a public catastrophic long-term care insurance program. In effect, people would use private insurance, savings, or home equity to pay for the first few years of their care needs, then the government would pick up costs for people with true catastrophic needs. Today, two highly-respected long-term care experts offered an important [...]
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 [...]