Acute shortages of home health aides and nursing assistants are cropping up across the country, threatening care for people with serious disabilities and vulnerable older adults.
In Minnesota and Wisconsin, nursing homes have denied admission to thousands of patients over the past year because they lack essential staff, according to local long-term care associations.
via Kaiser Health News.
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#politics #medicaid #health #healthcare #p2 #older americans #elderly #medicare #entitlements #entitlement reform #home health workers #older adultsOn Tuesday, April 19, 2016 the Older Americans Act (OAA) was reauthorized for three years – an important bipartisan accomplishment. Enacted in July 1965 along with Medicare and Medicaid, the law is a key piece of policy that empowers the Administration for Community Living (ACL) to fund programs across the country that are dedicated to helping seniors stay in their communities.
via Altarum.
We already know the AHCA would take health care away for 24 million people. But guess what? There’s so much more.
via CBPP.
The National Committee strongly condemns the American Health Care Act (AHCA) just passed by the House, which needlessly puts the healthcare of millions of older Americans in jeopardy. “Despite the bill’s name, risking the health of our nation’s most vulnerable citizens to give the wealthy an $880 billion tax cut is tremendously uncaring — and does not reflect real American values…”
May is Older Americans Month, but the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans are putting a serious damper on the celebration. Yes, candidate Trump promised not to touch Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
But his administration has been actively undermining those pledges. Budget Director Mick Mulvaney — who once called Social Security a Ponzi scheme — questioned the legitimacy of Social Security Disability Insurance — and wouldn’t promise a Presidential veto of legislation to privatize Medicare (a pet project of House Speaker Paul Ryan).
President Trump champions the GOP’s American Health Care Act, which guts
Medicaid, undermines the solvency of Medicare, and allows insurers to
charge older Americans up to five times as much as people in their 20s.
Because good, explanatory journalism is in short supply and TV shouting matches don’t tell you much, I decided to use this space to discuss some of the possible changes that could soon affect millions of people in their 60s and older.
First, let’s consider Medicaid, the federal-state program that finances healthcare for the poor and long term care for the middle class. Virtually all the talk about cutting Medicaid by more than $800 billion over the next 10 years has centered on the 11 million people who gained health coverage under the Medicaid provisions of the Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare.
Most of those Americans will lose their health coverage if the legislation the House passed in early May to replace Obamacare gets through the Senate. Equally affected will be seniors and their families who now count on Medicaid to fund long-term care.
via Herald-News.
Make no mistake: recent developments on the Hill should provide seniors with some sense of relief about the future of the programs they depend upon. But, as with an approaching storm whose course keeps changing, any sense of relief can only be temporary. Congressional conservatives’ attempts to gut Medicaid, privatize Medicare, and cut programs that benefit older Americans have been slowed, but not stopped.
But unlike the repeal-and-replace legislation that thankfully failed, the new plan does not gut Medicaid, make premiums unaffordable for older Americans, reduce the solvency of Medicare, or punish people with pre-existing conditions.
AHCA’s > $800B in reduced Medicaid funding has implications for 6M seniors & 10M nonelderly people w/ disabilities.
The “real” drivers of debt, according to McConnell, are “Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid,” “entitlements” from which the Senate majority leader would cut off the old and poor if only he could get Democrats to sign on.
(That’s probably unlikely to happen, given Nancy Pelosi’s statement today that, “Like clockwork, Republicans in Congress are setting in motion their plan to destroy the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that seniors and families rely on, just months after they exploded the deficit by $2 trillion with their tax scam for the rich,” and Chuck Schumer’s that suggesting cuts to “middle-class programs like Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid as the only fiscally responsible solution to solve the debt problem is nothing short of gaslighting.”)
via Vanity Fair.
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In fact, tax expenditures – especially the Trump/GOP tax cuts – are the number one drivers of the debt, not Social Security or Medicare. Social Security is self-funded and does not contribute to the debt.
