Likely Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has proposed a major new initiative to encourage state Medicaid programs to expand home and community-based care for low-income older adults and younger people with disabilities. While the proposal is ambitious, it addresses the long-term care needs of the Medicaid population in an especially complicated way. It still leaves huge gaps in Medicaid-based care [...]
Nearly every American knows who George Floyd was and how he died. Tens of thousands around the country took to the streets to protest his May 25 killing by a Minneapolis police officer. Just a month after his death, the US House of Representatives passed a major police reform bill—normally a process that would take years. If George Floyd has [...]
A divided congressional long-term care commission has adopted a package of recommendations aimed at improving the nation’s long-term supports and services. However, while a majority of the panel agreed on some modest delivery and workforce reforms, it could not reach a consensus on all-important financing solutions. In effect, the commission will recommend changes that would effectively retain the current framework of financing [...]
The Congressional Long-Term Care Commission has selected SCAN Foundation president Bruce A. Chernof as its chair and Mark Warshawsky, director of retirement research at the consulting firm Towers Watson, as Vice Chair. The panel will hold its first meeting on June 27. The commission also quietly replaced one of its members, former Louisiana Secretary of Health and Hospitals Bruce Greenstein. His [...]
The other day, long-term care insurance gadfly Stephen Moses called me "an advocate of more government financing and an enemy of private LTC financing alternatives." I assume he said this because I believe that reforms such as the CLASS Act, which would create a national long-term care insurance system, would be a far better way to pay for this assistance [...]