Yesterday morning, a veteran of the decades-long effort to improve the way we deliver and pay for long-term supports and services asked me a question. Why, he wondered, should he believe that recent attempts to reform long-term care could succeed when so many previous initiatives have failed. Last evening, I may have found an answer. My wife and I went to see [...]
With the election behind him, Barack Obama's first item of business will be dealing with the fiscal cliff--that toxic combination of tax increases and automatic spending cuts that are due to kick in on Jan 2, unless Congress acts to delay or replace them with a long-term deficit reduction plan. Going over the cliff would mean deep cuts in a wide range of government programs. [...]
Why not make insurance for long-term care services and supports part of health care coverage? It is a radical idea that turns the current model—which often treats long-term care insurance as an element of retirement planning—entirely on its head. The concept isn’t new. John Rother, who ran public policy for AARP for many years, talked about integrating long-term services and [...]
Increasingly, surgeons are beginning to change the way they perform operations on elderly patients. They are coming to realize that almost everything is different about surgery on older people: The patient’s goals, the likelihood of complications, and the entire process of treatment from pre-op through surgery itself to recovery. As a result, doctors are learning that they not only need [...]
My dad, who had congestive heart failure, lived on the second floor of a garden apartment building that had no elevator. As the disease made him weaker, he could no long walk down the stairs. And for the last year of his life, he was trapped in his own apartment. An "outing" was a slow walk, and eventually, a wheelchair ride about 100 feet to the [...]
Elder abuse is hard to define, and it is a challenge to know how widespread it is. But it is a deeply serious problem and I recently came across two elder abuse stories worth passing on. If you are an elder care professional or an adult child caring for parents, read them carefully. And beware. The first is courtesy of Steve Goldberg, a Washington, D.C. investment adviser and contributing [...]
For seniors trying to manage multiple chronic disease, moving from one care setting to another can literally be a matter of life and death. That's why it is so important that health providers--doctors, nursing homes, hospitals, assisted living facilities, and home care agencies--work together to make sure that those moves happen safely. Too often in our poorly coordinated health and long-term care systems, those [...]
The co-chairs of President Obama's bipartisan deficit commision have proposed a far-reaching plan to reduce the nation's massive deficit. It includes big changes for both current and future seniors. Among them: higher Social Security taxes and reforms in the design of benefits, reduced payments to Medicare providers and greater cost sharing by Medicare beneficiaries, and, perhaps most dramatic, a fundamental change in federal payments for Medicaid long-term [...]
Private long-term care insurance got a nice boost from a new study by the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The report, by the consulting firm LifePlans Inc, concluded that nearly 98 percent of those filing claims against their LTC policies received benefits, despite articles by The New York Times and others suggesting that claims denials are widespread. The study also [...]