Medicare

Key Questions About Harris’s Historic Medicare Home Care Idea

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris says she wants to create a home-based long-term care benefit under Medicare. She’s suggesting an historic change in the health care system for older adults and some younger people with disabilities. But her idea raises important political and policy questions. Harris describes the broad outlines of her plan in a hard-to-find fact sheet here. Oddly, [...]

By |2024-10-15T10:47:12-04:00October 15th, 2024|Medicare|0 Comments

Harris Would Create A New Medicare Benefit For Long-term Care

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has backed an earth-shattering idea: For the first time, traditional Medicare would pay for personal assistance  at home and related long-term care. Currently, only Medicaid and certain Medicare managed care programs provide long-term care benefits. Harris endorsed the idea in an appearance on the television show The View and her staff heavily promoted her initiative [...]

By |2024-10-08T16:27:41-04:00October 8th, 2024|long-term care|0 Comments

What A President Harris Would Mean For Seniors

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is working hard to win the support of older voters, but what would she do to address their many concerns if she is elected president? In a campaign that has not yet shown many of its policy cards, Harris has offered only the roughest sketch of a governing agenda. But her time as vice president [...]

By |2024-08-22T16:01:42-04:00August 22nd, 2024|Kamala Harris|0 Comments

The 2024 Republican Platform’s Empty Promises To Older Adults

The Republican party platform, orchestrated by former President Trump, is filled with promises for those it calls “our Great Seniors.”  But there is little or no real policy behind most of those campaign pledges. And the document is filled with many irreconcilable contradictions. The platform will be the GOP’s election-year policy framework coming out of its upcoming July 15-18 nominating [...]

By |2024-07-11T15:53:14-04:00July 11th, 2024|campaign 2024|0 Comments

Yes, Americans Are Aging But Their Experiences Are Very Different

We all know the population of older adults is growing rapidly. But we are aging in very different ways. And if we are going to reimagine medicine, caregiving, and government policy, it is important to better understand who older adults are and how they live. In its newest Profile of Older Americans, the federal Administration for Community Living paints a [...]

By |2024-06-05T11:02:05-04:00June 5th, 2024|Aging|0 Comments

Treating The Epidemic Of Loneliness And Social Isolation Among Seniors

One of the many lessons we should have learned from the Covid-19 pandemic is the cost to older adults of loneliness and social isolation. While nearly 900,000 older adults died from the virus, tens of thousands were sickened and may have died from the isolation the pandemic caused. But what have we learned from that tragic experience? Whether older adults [...]

By |2024-05-21T11:31:43-04:00May 21st, 2024|elder care, Health reform, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Don’t Expect A Boost In Nursing Home Staff Any Time Soon

With great fanfare, the Biden Administration recently announced new regulations aimed at increasing staffing at nursing homes and boosting pay for some home care workers. The laudable intention: To improve care for frail older adults and younger people with disabilities. But don’t expect changes anytime soon. It will be years before either of these rules are fully implemented. The new [...]

By |2024-05-02T15:41:56-04:00May 2nd, 2024|long-term care workers|0 Comments

Biden Sets New Nursing Home Staffing Rules

The Biden Administration has announced it will impose new minimum staffing rules for nursing homes. But the regulations appear to give facilities time to meet the requirements. Separately, the Administration also is requiring that home care agencies allocate at least 80 percent of their Medicaid payments to staff compensation. States would have flexibility to adjust the rules for small and [...]

By |2024-04-22T14:44:30-04:00April 22nd, 2024|nursing homes|0 Comments

How A Handful of Drugs is Squeezing Medicare

Medicare expects it will spend more $550 million this year for the controversial anti-Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi and predicts the cost will skyrocket to $3.5 billion in 2025, according to Stat News. The program spent $5.7 billion on drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro in 2022, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.  These GLP-1 medications were designed to treat type 2 [...]

By |2024-04-18T11:17:15-04:00April 18th, 2024|Medicare|0 Comments

Do Nursing Homes Low-Ball Profit Reports To Get Higher Government Payments?

Do nursing home owners understate the profits they report to federal regulators by shifting income to related businesses? Two academic experts in nursing home finance found that in one state 63 percent of margins are hidden this way. To put it another way, only 37 percent of true nursing home profits are reported to federal regulators. A new paper by [...]

By |2024-03-18T11:12:09-04:00March 18th, 2024|nursing homes|0 Comments