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LTC Bullet: How to Save Pennsylvania Billions: Two New Center Studies Released Wednesday, January 12, 2011 Seattle-- LTC Comment: Read "Long-Term Care Reform: More Access to Better Care at Lower Costs" and "The Keystone of Long-Term Care: More Access to Better Care at Lower Public Cost for Pennsylvanians" after the ***news.***
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U.S.
Nursing Home Closings Hit Poor Neighborhoods Hardest: Study:
"Widespread nursing home closures over the past decade have
resulted in a 5 percent drop in available nursing home beds across the
United States, with poor, urban neighborhoods hardest hit, new research
reveals." LTC
Comment: This is one example
of what we mean when we write that the impending collapse of Medicaid
long-term care will hurt the poor most.
But it will also send the middle class and affluent rushing to LTCI
producers for protection which is becoming obvious to them that they need.
*** ***
LTC PARTNERSHIP TRAINING: "LTC
Connection, a continuing education company that specializes in offering
mandatory LTC Partnership Training in a classroom setting, has launched
their 2011 class schedule. The
classes . . . include many new and exciting initiatives in order to make
Partnership training the best value for LTC agents, distributors and
insurance carriers." Press
release. *** LTC BULLET:
HOW TO SAVE PENNSYLVANIA BILLIONS:
TWO NEW CENTER STUDIES RELEASED LTC Comment: Your
Center for Long-Term Care Reform is capitalizing in these first weeks of
2011 on many months of research conducted during the second half of 2010. Last week, we announced publication
of our study titled "Medi-Cal
Long-Term Care: Safety Net or
Hammock" by California's Pacific
Research Institute. Read
a California Healthline
"most-commented" review of that "incendiary" report here. This week, we're proud to announce
the publication of two more reports generated from the Center's research.
Yesterday, Pennsylvania's Commonwealth
Foundation, a free-market
think tank, released "Long-Term
Care Reform: More Access to
Better Care at Lower Costs," which is based on our research, in
tandem with their own study "Five
Ways to Cut $5 Billion." Our
LTC recommendations added to their proposals brought the total savings for
"Keystone State" taxpayers to $8.1 billion:
Today,
the Center for Long-Term Care Reform is releasing "The
Keystone of Long-Term Care: More Access to Better Care at Lower
Public Cost for Pennsylvanians."
This is our full-length study, conducted for the Commonwealth
Foundation, on which their abridged version, published yesterday and
described above, is based. We
want to thank the Commonwealth Foundation for retaining the Center to
conduct this research and for their invaluable assistance in conducting
the research and publicizing the results. Following
is the "Executive Summary" from our full-length report. ------------- Executive
Summary Long-term
care is very expensive whether provided in a nursing home, an assisted
living facility or in someone's home. Medicaid
pays for most professional long-term care in Pennsylvania.
The cost is already huge and likely to increase rapidly because of
the Commonwealth's aging demographics. Most
people prefer to receive long-term care in their homes instead of going to
a nursing home, but Pennsylvania Medicaid pays mostly for nursing home
care. That's
all changing as Pennsylvania Medicaid pursues "rebalancing" from
nursing-home to home care in a massive effort one official compared to the
"Manhattan project." The
goal of rebalancing is to provide more of the home care people prefer at
less cost, based on the opinion that, overall, home care is less expensive
than nursing home care. But
research does not bear out the view that home care saves money overall.
In fact, providing more home care delays but does not replace
institutional care and costs more in total. Furthermore,
rebalancing without controlling eligibility discourages free care and
private LTC financing alternatives while encouraging Medicaid enrollment
and "Medicaid planning." The
only way to rebalance Medicaid to provide more home care at less cost is
to reduce the number of Pennsylvanians who become dependent on the program
in the future. Only
four alternative sources of LTC financing exist:
(1) Asset Spend Down, (2) Estate Recoveries, (3) Home Equity
Conversion, and (4) Private Long-Term Care Insurance. This
report explains why these alternative funding sources remain small and how
to maximize them to relieve Medicaid and enable the program to rebalance
cost-effectively. Pennsylvania
Medicaid would save nearly $120 million per year by preventing only 20% of
its "dual eligibles" from ending up dependent on the program in
the future. If
Pennsylvania Medicaid recovered from estates at the same rate as Oregon,
the Commonwealth could recover an additional $213 million per year. Pennsylvania
may have 135,000 households "at risk for spending down" that
could receive an estimated $62,800 each or $8.5 billion in total from
reverse mortgages to help pay for their own long-term care, stay off
Medicaid or at least delay Medicaid dependency. In the absence of Medicaid's $500,000 home equity exemption and with other tougher income and asset limits, far more Pennsylvanians would purchase private long-term care insurance, avoid Medicaid dependency altogether, and save the Commonwealth large sums. _____________ |
