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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
President Biden’s 2025 budget proposal, which will double as his presidential campaign platform, includes major proposals aimed at supporting older adults. It would raise taxes to help fund Medicare, increase federal support for Medicaid home-based care,, create a federal family leave program for those caring for older adults as well as children, and toughen regulation and inspections of nursing homes. [...]
The US health system focuses an enormous amount of money and attention on post-acute care—the medical treatment patients receive after they have been discharged from a hospital. But it would more cost effective, and far better for patients, to refocus on what you might call pre-acute care: What the US can do to prevent those hospitalizations in the first place. [...]
In response to the recent burst of inflation, the government increased Social Security benefits significantly in the past two years. But compared to average pre-retirement income, net benefits have been falling for decades. And the trend will continue. One big reason: Rapidly rising Medicare premiums that usually are deducted directly from Social Security checks. Think about Social Security benefits in [...]