LTC Bullet: McKnight's
Editor Highlights LTC Tour Monday,
January 14, 2008 Fort
Lauderdale, Florida-- LTC
Comment: A key LTC provider
trade journal cheers on the Center for Long-Term Care Reform's National
Long-Term Care Consciousness Tour after the ***news.*** *** REFERRALS.
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BULLET: MCKNIGHT'S EDITOR
HIGHLIGHTS LTC TOUR LTC
Comment: A key lesson of
the Center's LTC Graduate Seminar (now available online; contact Damon
for details) is that to understand long-term care financing, one must
also understand LTC service delivery.
Want
to know why the public is in denial about long-term care in the richest
country in the world? Want
to understand why America has a welfare-financed, nursing-home-based LTC
system? If so, you'd better
learn all you can about the profession that provides long-term care in
nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
To
learn about the business of providing nursing home and assisted living
care, read two trade journals regularly:
McKnight's Long-Term Care News and McKnight's Assisted
Living. Subscribe at http://www.mcknightsonline.com/content/index.php?id=177.
While you're there, sign up for McKnight's Daily Updates.
These print journals and email updates are a trusted source of
information for me and I'm confident you'll find them helpful as well. The
editor's column in the current issue of McKnight's LTC News
highlights the Center for Long-Term Care Reform's National Long-Term
Care Consciousness Tour. We
thought you'd like to see this editorial, so it follows.
Special thanks to editor Jim Berklan for covering this important
topic. --------------- McKnight's LTC News The
year-end scramble for Medicare and Medicaid dollars ended with a bang -
and the usual whimpers from various provider interests. There
were winners on one side, losers on the other. And then there were those
who won some but weren't totally satisfied - in a big group in the
middle. And
with a new year starting, the funding game begins again. The
long-term care funding puzzle is beyond Rubik's cube stage, despite the
best efforts of lawmakers and august bodies such as the short-lived
National Commission for Quality Long-Term Care. Significant
barriers still exist to figuring out how to stretch dollars far enough
in the overly complex Medicaid program. A
recent Kaiser report tapped into a large pool of disenchantment with
Medicaid, long-term care's No. 1 funding source. Many commonly
recommended funding alternatives to current schemes don't take into
account that low-income beneficiaries simply can't afford to take part,
report authors noted. "Greater
coverage of private long-term care insurance and use of home equity
programs, such as reverse mortgages, are not applicable to many
low-income elderly and disabled people served by the [Medicaid]
program," wrote authors from the Kaiser Family Foundation's
Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. Then,
there are the more well off and those who do have some home equity to
play with. That's where Steve Moses and his tireless campaign to get
bogus Medicaid beneficiaries out of the mix come into play. Moses,
the well-traveled, eloquent leader of the Center for Long-Term Care
Reform, has embarked on a yearlong, nationwide journey to stump for
better long-term care funding options. Odds are he and his "Silver
Bullet" trailer will be coming to an area near you in 2008. Moses
says he wants to reach out to long-term care providers and get them more
involved. He reasons that operators can only benefit if more private
long-term care insurance is brought into the mix and fewer people use
estate planning to drain Medicaid funding. He'll
spend the first couple of months in the Southeast and strategically
shoot the Bullet to other regions as the seasons change. On Jan. 27, in
fact, he'll be in Greensboro, NC, addressing an audience at the North
Carolina Health Care Facilities Association. Whether he'll be able to get enough policy makers to pay attention and act on his message in 2008 remains to be seen. But if history has taught us anything, it's that Moses will be going the extra mile to try. |