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Vice President Kamala Harris unveiled another part of her domestic agenda today, announcing that she will ask Congress to expand Medicare to cover the cost of long-term care in people’s homes. That would give elderly and disabled Americans the option of receiving care at home instead of entering a nursing home, and would allow greater independence for millions of seniors and people with disabilities who would be able to get help with everyday tasks.
It would also be an enormous helping hand to the more than 37 million Americans (14 percent of adults) who currently provide some form of unpaid elder care in the US. Women make up the majority — around 59 percent — of those caregivers.
Here’s Harris announcing the proposal today on “The View,” where she recalled providing care at home for her own mother after her mom, a cancer researcher herself, received a cancer diagnosis.
“There are so many people in our country who are right in the middle,” Harris said. “They’re taking care of their kids and they’re taking care of their aging parents, and it’s just almost impossible to do it all, especially if they work. We’re finding that so many are then having to leave their jobs, which means losing a source of income. Not to mention the emotional stress.”
Harris said the policy would particularly help the “sandwich generation” of adults who find themselves raising their own kids and caring for an aging parent, either in the parent’s home or after the parent comes to live with them. Hey, have you guys met the editrix? Yes you have, she jumped in to Dok’s post to type this. How about three generations, have you thought about taking care of three generations? Like an aged parent, a minor child, and a minor grandperson? Honestly it’s a pretty good time, and also honestly, PLEASE PASS THIS THING IMMEDIATELY, WHATEVER IT MIGHT BE! Okay, editrix out.
As Reuters notes, Harris picked the venue for the announcement carefully, since “The View’s” audience is largely middle-aged and older women, the very folks the policy is aimed at. Roughly a quarter of Americans are in the “sandwich generation” age bracket, although it’s possible a lot of the men don’t know it and think it might make for a hilarious joke about what women need to make them. They would do well to not say that out loud.
Currently, Medicare doesn’t usually provide help with at-home long-term care services. Medicaid, the state and federal healthcare system for low-income people, does help with such care, but seniors and their families basically have to go into poverty to qualify because the Greatest Country on Earth never figured out how to make healthcare a basic right.
Harris’s proposal, then, is a big fucking deal. Tricia Newman, executive director of the Program on Medicare Policy at the health policy nonprofit KFF, told CNBC, “It’s been a long time — decades — since a presidential candidate put forward a Medicare proposal to help middle income families cope with the crushing cost of home care.”
Ahem: Joe Biden can’t get no respect! Sorry we had that bad case of Joe Manchin!
The very limited eligibility rules for long-term care under Medicaid, Newman explained, can leave “many middle income families on the hook for the cost of caring for an aging parent or grandparent.”
Paying for a 24-7 private home health aide out of pocket, KFF estimates, can cost families over $288,000 annually, per this CNBC comparison chart based on KFF data.
As for how Harris would pay for the new program, Harris said it can be covered by the anticipated savings Medicare will see from negotiating prescription drug prices. “We’re going to save Medicare the money because we’re not going to be paying these high prices,” Harris said.
One estimate, by the Brookings Institution, is that the program would cost about $40 billion a year, a bargain compared to trying to deport all the immigrants in the US, some of whom can no doubt work in the new program in another decade if we’d adopt Harris’s sane immigration reforms. Haha, we think such crazy liberal things!
We can only assume JD Vance is preparing to go on a rightwing podcast to explain that the great thing about America is that so many women already do the right thing without big government getting in their way. Or perhaps video from a few years ago will emerge in which he praises older Americans for gracefully dying at home surrounded by the children and grandchildren to whom they have already passed on their genetic heritage.
[HuffPost / NBC News / Reuters]
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