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Kamala Harris wants Medicare to cover long-term home care

You know, this is a pretty big deal:

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday announced a plan for Medicare to cover long-term-care services at home, a significant expansion of the program that would be aimed at helping tens of millions of Americans who are caring for aging parents.

....Under Harris’s plan, Medicare would cover services such as in-home aides so seniors could stay in their homes rather than move to nursing homes or long-term-care facilities. One goal, Harris said, is to make it easier for caregivers to continue working, as taking care of aging parents with growing limitations can become all-consuming.

The only downside of Harris's proposal is that Medicare ought to pay for any long-term care, whether it's at home or not. But half a loaf is better than none.

What's really notable about this, though, is that it got hardly any attention from a media that's allegedly hungry for serious policy news. It's halfway down the page at the Washington Post. It's a tiny blurb at the Wall Street Journal. It's nowhere to be found at the New York Times and LA Times. CNN has nothing. CBS News has a tiny blurb, but the other networks have nothing.

Is it because Harris announced this on The View? Because it's just boring policy wonkery? Because it's girl stuff? wtf?

55 thoughts on “Kamala Harris wants Medicare to cover long-term home care

  1. bmore

    yes, it is a big deal. Although she says it can be paid for with drug cost negotiations and some other areas of savings, if it allows people to stay in their homes longer and stay out of nursing homes, it could reduce Medicaid expenses for nursing home.care.

    1. lawnorder

      It might well be paid for from Medicare savings on hospital stays. It's fairly common to have patients occupying expensive hospital beds when with proper, and cheaper, home care they could be released.

  2. different_name

    What's really notable about this, though, is that it got hardly any attention from a media that's allegedly hungry for serious policy news.

    "Allegedly" is doing a lot of work there.

    Are we still pretending the national political press hasn't devolved into a mean girls clique?

    1. Joseph Harbin

      Mean boys clique is more like it, no?

      If Harris announced a new nationwide DNA database with mandatory sperm samples from all adult males, maybe the clique would pay more attention to The View.

      1. Anandakos

        That would SURE jet-propel the development of the Great Tree of Humanity. Will the FBI share some of the samples with Family Tree DNA?

        That would be Big Y-squared. Or Big Y to the Big Y!

  3. BriPet

    Doesn’t Medicare already pay for long term care in nursing homes? The issue has always been that there’s no equality for home & community based care.

    1. bmore

      Medicare.will pay for a certain amount of rehab. Nursing home care is generally paid for by the individual until their money runs out. Then Medicaid takes over. They take all of the resident's money except for a small amount ($72/month when my father and aunt were on nursing homes 10+ ysars ago). Some people have long term care insurance but that has become very expensive. So yeah, it's a big deal.

    2. D_Ohrk_E1

      Generally, Medicare pays for hospice (end of life -- 6 months or less, unless recertified by doctor) care but not long-term care.

      1. Art Eclectic

        It's trickier than than, we're going through it right now with my Mom. She's very, very close and the hospital is telling us that Medicare will pay for the hospice worker, but that's only for someone to visit and manage comfort. The facility is NOT covered. So, we can move her into a rehab/ skilled nursing facility but the facility isn't covered, just the worker.

        That's assuming she even makes it out of the hospital alive. Boomers are going to demand an overhaul of this whole process.

        We are checking into Long Term Care insurance based on what we're going through with Mom.

      1. bbleh

        I can attest from several years' experience to this, but often aides aren't enough unless they're 24 hours and then it IS expensive -- *IF* you can find people who are willing to do it AND are at least reasonably reliable.

        We had aides for like 7-8 hours a day, but I still had to be there nearly full time. It is an ENORMOUS drain on caregivers, emotionally at least as much as financially.

    1. bethby30

      As Kevin pointed out negotiations to get Medicare’s drug costs down — a huge part of the costs — and the savings from keeping people at home are a big part of how this will be paid.

  4. cephalopod

    Things that code as "women's issues" often get limited attention.

    Covering home care will be extremely important in the future. Fewer adults are married. Fewer adults have siblings. That means there are fewer people available to care for aging parents, or to provide financial support for the caregivers.

    Too many people in their 50s and 60s have had to leave work early to do unpaid eldercare. We won't be able to afford to lose those workers, and they can't afford to lose that many years of income and afford their own retirements.

  5. msobel

    It would be biased of them to give any prominence to a sensible obviously popular proposal rendered in clear English. That would be unfair to Trump.

  6. pjcamp1905

    Why does the media not care about it? Whatever made you think the thing the media are complaining about is the thing they want to see more of? The horse race drives clicks. Deep discussions of policy don't. Remember when Elizabeth Warren campaigned on a basket full of plans? Media didn't give a shit about that either.

  7. Steve_OH

    Having recently spent over $100,000 for long-term nursing care, I would tend to agree that this is a big deal....

  8. peterh32

    Sorry, bigger fish to fry:
    “Here are 13 things we learned from Kamala Harris’s interview with Howard Stern”

  9. D_Ohrk_E1

    MSM journalistic outlets are pissed that they're not getting the sit down interviews with Harris, so they're ignoring all but things that might paint Harris in a bad light, even as they give Trump a pass to ignore them.

    This would be a wonderful, top-priority expansion of Medicare but maybe let's means-test this, yeah?

    1. Joseph Harbin

      ...maybe let's means-test this, yeah?

      Maybe not. The less means-testing for Medicare, the better long-term political support for the program, imo.

      1. D_Ohrk_E1

        Oh, most definitely the MSM has a double-standard.

        They need a horse race to sell print, after all, so they'll always be incentivized to manufacture false narratives.

      2. BKDad

        When I first read her comment on that, it was before Kevin had pointed it out. I was really taken back.

        So, now she's on my ignore list, which is getting pretty long for that newspaper. I'm down to about three columnists I respect and like, even if I don't always or even often agree with them. That probably won't be enough to carry them through the next renewal period. The thing is, they really don't care. (Like Melania.)

  10. raoul

    Things we have learned the last few years that are broken in no particular order: 1- the press is broken 2- the Republican Party is broken 3- the Supreme Court is broken.

  11. Yikes

    Everyone who has been through it knows and if you have not good luck.

    The problem, to my mind, the main one, is that people don’t go from “fine” to full on skilled nursing facility overnight. To say that assisted living gov programs are lacking is an understatement. Yet, the need is off the charts. If you can afford it, you are in a different class from people who simply can’t

    1. ScentOfViolets

      If my personal experience is anything to go by, you're correct. However, a lot of us have, are, or will be taking care of an aging relative and you've be surprised out how much you can do on your own if you're committed. In my mother's case we finally had to hire a home health care nurse when her dementia go too bad to leave her alone for any significant period of time. Six weeks later she'd blown through three health care aides and was put on the do not fly list, metaphorically speaking. So, not overnight, but pretty close. That might be specific to dementia though: Even as the afflicted mind goes, their body stays perfectly healthy.

      1. Austin

        “…you've be surprised out how much you can do on your own if you're committed.”

        Yes most of us aren’t willing to just toss our elderly relatives out to the curb for the county/state to pick up and deal with. So I guess we’re all “committed” alright. Still is a pretty shitty situation for most folk, having to hobble together a 24/7 plan to take care of their relatives on their own, committed or not.

        1. FrankM

          We had both my mother and mother-in-law living with us for the last few years of their lives (not at the same time, thankfully). It was FAR better than a nursing home which, if not for Medicare-paid hospice care and out-of-pocket aides (probably in the neighborhood of $60k+), the nursing home would have been the only choice. I'm quite certain it was a lot cheaper than a nursing home, so the question of how to pay for it seems rather ridiculous to me.

  12. NotCynicalEnough

    The MSM is concerned with the horse race, why Trump voters still like Trump, and doing mini focus groups of "undecided" voters. They don't do policy although they are willing to condense Trump's insane ranting and label that "policy". Also there was a big storm and another one on the way, plus Israel, plus drinks with Republicans. Who has time to write about long term care?

  13. Austin

    Obviously, Kamala needs to do more mainstream media interviews and put out more policy papers, because then the major news outlets will just have to cover the serious issues facing America and we can all stop worrying about voters having nothing to assess the candidates on but vibes.

    Is our Kevin finally learning that newspapers and TV shows aren’t interested in conducting serious interviews or covering policy in detail?

  14. FrankM

    Fah. When Trump is elected he will have a much better plan for much less money. Right now there are only concepts of a plan, but they'll have a full plan ready to announce very shortly.

  15. jdubs

    Nobody cares. The media doesnt care. Voters dont care. Chicken or the egg...I dont know, but we can be certain that almost nobody cares about policies, actions or even results.

    You cant get to the point where Trump wins 1 election let alone almost 3 with anyone caring about this stuff.

    1. jte21

      Dollars to donuts the average low-information MAGA voter thinks Medicare already covers long term elder care, which, as others upthread have pointed out, it doesn't. By the time most people discover what the reality is, it's too late and the family faces financial ruin.

  16. middleoftheroaddem

    I wonder if this idea feels like vaper wear, and thus is discounted as not real.

    Without a way to pay for the idea and a likely GOP Senate, folks don't see this policy as real/likely to happen. In contrast, Harris could say, 'I will use the expiring Trump tax cut as my pay for.' Then release an economic study etc

    1. jte21

      The point is, I think, she's put this out there. Yes, it may be more aspirational than anything given our current political situation, but hopefully it then puts a lot of GOP pols on the spot asking them what *their* solution is to the problem of affording long term care. (Answer: "Go fuck yourself." )

    2. FrankM

      To paraphrase your question: We're going to replace very expensive nursing home care with much cheaper home care. However will we find a way to pay for this?

    3. Josef

      To repeat what someone already said, to get on Medicaid to pay for it you'd have to be destitute. Still the quality of most nursing homes that take Medicaid is horrible.

  17. lower-case

    the press is only interested in policy proposals wrapped in a sit-down that will be dissected, analyzed, and edited into 30 second attack ads

    and the complete sit-down will only be covered by the interviewer's publication while the hit pieces will run universally

  18. Laertes

    What's the significance, really, of a major policy change that's proposed just weeks before election day? If you want to know who a candidate is, you look at their record, not the promises of the moment.

    If some policy proposal is the centerpiece of their campaign, like the affordable care act was, then you can reasonably expect that the candidate is going to put some energy and political capital into it once elected. But a new policy, hatched after voting has already begun? C'mon, how seriously should anyone take that?

    1. Laertes

      Counterpoint: Nobody should take it at all seriously. Similarly, nobody should pay any attention to the creep's dashboard-light promises about protecting reproductive rights. But somehow those transparently silly promises rated front-page coverage.

      So why are one candidate's desperate last-minute policy pitches reported out, while the other's are buried?

  19. JohnH

    The NY Times is as egregious as ever, all the while giving just enough credence to the thought that they're doing the right thing. Its online version this morning had another policy interview or two on its Politics page, so it's not exactly refusing to consider that Harris is responding to cries for more interviews and more policy. The session on The View is left instead to its Health page (the headline also mentioning vision care as Kevin does not), with a big pic of Harris amid the six women stars, like a conclave of TV celebs.

    The whole cry for more policy is hypocrisy anyway. They know quite well that Harris has a record and a program from her part in California and as vice-president. They know quite well that the public hardly cares and that they themselves hardly cover it, preferring Trump's carrying on and the latest polls. The whole thing is an excuse to then characterize the Democrat as a policy wonk like Gore and Hillary Clinton (tsk tsk) or to play up GOP charges of socialism.

  20. Josef

    Keeping your loved ones out of nursing homes or even assisted living is your number one priority. Most of them are horrible. Unless you can afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront. Even then I doubt the care is better.

    1. BKDad

      A pal of mine recently went through this. His wife started developing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease a couple years ago. So, he hired round the clock help to tend to her needs. He did his part, too, of course.

      A couple months ago, he moved her to a specialty home. His kids were the main provocateurs in that, and he had resisted. But, he had to admit that she is now doing better than she was at home.

      I'm certain that it must be costing far more each year for this than it would cost to send a kid to the most expensive college out there. But, he can well afford it and it *is* his wife. So, he visits her almost every day now, as do the daughters.

      But, imagine if you don't have so many millions that you can't count them. Like almost all of the rest of us. It's heartbreaking.

  21. samgamgee

    "What's really notable about this, though, is that it got hardly any attention from a media that's allegedly hungry for serious policy news"

    That's because the demand for more "interviews" was predicated on BS reasoning. 'She needs to get her policies in front of people'. A crap justification.

    They just wanted interviews for airtime and to have someone to add to their 24x7 news cycle. The rest was just pompous posturing

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