Wednesday,
May 1, 2002
Seattle--
***
Fair warning: this is an important
Bullet, but a long one. You may
want to print or save it to review at your leisure. ***
***
If you're in the area, don't miss the Center for Long-Term Care Financing's next
full-day LTC Graduate Seminars. We're
doing the program in Pittsburgh on May 13 and in Philadelphia on May 14.
Seven continuing education credits are pending approval.
For all the details, including new scheduling for future programs in
other cities, go to http://www.centerltc.com/ltc_grad_seminar.htm
and then contact Amy Marohn to register (mailto:amy@centerltc.org
or 425-377-9500). We're planning on
Dallas, Houston and New Orleans in late September, Atlanta in October, St. Louis
in November, and Florida locations in December. ***
***
Because of heavy demand for access to the Center's donor-only zone, we ask your
patience. We'll try to send your
keys to The Zone, i.e. your username and password, as soon as possible after you
qualify by contributing $100 to the Center for Long-Term Care Financing.
But please give us 72 hours in case we're backed up.
You can contribute online from a bank account or credit card at http://www.centerltc.com/support/index.htm.
Then just email your preferred user name and password to mailto:amy@centerltc.org
and she'll Zone you in ASAP. ***
***
New content added today to the Center's donor-only zone includes two new LTC
Readers:
The
LTC Reader #17--Good News on LTCI Improvements: Long-term care insurance takes a lot of heat in the media.
Criticism focuses on premium increases, rate stability and "agent
abuse." Read Claude Thau on
the good news about improvements in policies and reductions in premiums relative
to benefits. In The Zone.
The
LTC Reader #18--GAO on Medicare Drug Coverage:
Seniors and their advocates are
demanding a new pharmaceutical benefit financed by Medicare. Is it more important than LTC?
Read
David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States.
In the Zone.
Use
The Zone to stay on top of the big issues in LTC. ***
LTC
BULLET: LTC WORKFORCE BLUES
As
we've been reporting to you regularly, America's long-term care service delivery
system is in a world of hurt. Nursing-home
and home-health-agency bankruptcies, slow assisted living fills, scarce capital,
low profitability, quality problems, dismal public relations, and skyrocketing
liability insurance premiums usually steal the headlines.
At last, however, the critical problem of long-term care workforce
shortages is beginning to get the attention it's due from academics and policy
makers.
The
Urban Institute published a report titled "Who Will Care for Us?:
Addressing the Long-Term Care Workforce Crisis" in October 2001.
This study, authored by Robyn I. Stone with Joshua M. Wiener, provides a
good overview of the problem, but offers a tortured analysis that misses the
primary cause of the worker shortage. Like
most academics, Stone and Wiener call for more "public and private"
programs and an extensive new "research and demonstration agenda."
These recommendations will keep the consulting firms, think tanks, and
bureaucrats busy, but they won't solve the problem.
Read our "LTC Comment" at the end of this Bullet for our take
on what's wrong and what must be done to fix it.
Following
are excerpts from the Urban Institute report's Introduction and Executive
Summary. Read the whole Executive
Summary at http://www.urban.org/health/CareForUs.html
and the full report in .pdf format at http://www.urban.org/pdfs/CareForUs.pdf.
(This is a large file and may take awhile to load.)
"INTRODUCTION
"The
paraprofessional long-term care workforce--nursing assistants, home health and
home care aides, personal care workers, and personal care attendants--forms the
centerpiece of the formal long-term care system. These frontline workers provide hands-on care, supervision,
and emotional support to millions of elderly and younger people with chronic
illness and disabilities. Low wages
and benefits, hard working conditions, heavy workloads, and a job that has been
stigmatized by society make worker recruitment and retention difficult.
"Executive
Summary
"Long-term
care providers report unprecedented vacancies and turnover rates for
paraprofessional workers. Increasingly,
the media, federal, and state policymakers and the industry itself are beginning
to acknowledge the labor shortage crisis and its potentially negative
consequences for quality of care and quality of life. These shortages are likely to worsen over time as demand
increases. . .
"The
Long-Term Care Frontline Workforce
"Most
paid providers of long-term care are paraprofessional workers.
After informal caregivers, these workers are the most essential component
in helping older persons and younger people with disabilities maintain some
level of function and quality of life. According
to recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, nursing assistants held
about 750,000 jobs in nursing homes in 1998, while home health and personal care
aides held about 746,000 jobs in that same year.
Like informal caregivers, the overwhelming majority of frontline
long-term care workers are women. About
55 percent of nursing assistants are white, 35 percent are black, and 10 percent
are Hispanic. Most workers are
relatively disadvantaged economically and have low levels of educational
attainment. While these
paraprofessional workers are engaged in physically and emotionally demanding
work, they are among the lowest paid in the service industry, making little more
than the minimum wage. National
data on the number of workers with health benefits is lacking, but state and
local studies suggest the rate of uninsurance is high.
"What
Is the Problem?
"The
severe shortage of nursing assistants, home health and home care aides, and
other paraprofessional workers is the primary trend influencing the current wave
of concern about the long-term care workforce. National data on turnover rates show wide variation,
depending on the source of the data: One source suggests that turnover rates
average about 45 percent for nursing homes and about 10 percent for home health
programs, while other data place average annual nursing home turnover at over
100 percent a year. High rates of
staff vacancies and turnover have negative effects on providers, consumers, and
workers: The cost to providers of replacing workers is high; quality of care may
suffer; and workers in under-staffed environments may suffer higher rates of
injury.
"The
future availability of frontline workers does not look promising.
There will be an unprecedented increase in the size of the elderly
population as the 'baby boom' generation ages.
BLS estimates that, in response to this rising demand, personal and home
care assistance will be the fourth-fastest growing occupation by 2006, with a
dramatic 84.7 percent growth rate expected.
The number of home health aides is expected to increase by 74.6 percent
and that of nursing assistants by 25.4 per-cent.
While these projections suggest that the demand for workers will
increase, the actual number of jobs may be tempered by the rate of economic
growth and the extent to which purchasers are willing or able to pay.
At the same time, as baby boomers approach old age, the pool of
middle-aged women who have traditionally provided care will also be
substantially smaller. Finally, with very low population and labor force growth,
even a 'normal' business cycle recession would likely yield only a modest
increase in the number of unemployed who could become part of a frontline worker
pool.
"Factors
Affecting the Supply and Quality of Workers
"The
success of efforts to recruit, retain, and maintain a long-term care workforce
is dependent on a variety of interdependent factors. One important influence on individuals' decisions to enter
and remain in the long-term care field is how society values the job.
Frontline worker jobs in long-term care are viewed by the public as
low-wage, unpleasant occupations that involve primarily maid services and care
of incontinent, cognitively unaware old people.
This image is exacerbated by media reports that feature poor quality care
by providers. . .
"Health
and long-term care policies also significantly affect workforce recruitment and
retention. Medicare and Medicaid
account for almost three-fifths of long-term care expenditures and therefore
play a substantial role in determining provider wages, benefits, and training
opportunities. Regulatory policy on
long-term care focuses primarily on protecting consumers, rather than on
responding to workers' concerns. . .
"Labor
policy plays an important role in determining the size of the pool of frontline
long-term care workers. The federal
government invests more than $8 billion annually to prepare primarily low-income
and unemployed individuals for new and better jobs.
Ironically, state and federal employment agencies indirectly prevent the
long-term care industry from participating in training support programs by
requiring that program graduates secure wages that are higher than typical
frontline worker salaries. While these policies are designed to protect trainees from
being shunted into poverty-level jobs, they essentially preclude graduates from
entering the paraprofessional long-term care labor force.
The federal Work Investment Act of 2000 does not include the same
requirements, but the effects of the new law are unclear. . .
"Given
the current labor shortage and gloomy projections about the future pool of
workers, many providers have expressed interest in immigration as a tool for
expanding the potential labor pool. But
immigration of low-wage workers would have to substantially increase to keep
pace with population aging and new long-term care demands.
Policymakers must recognize that having low-skilled immigrants fill
entry-level jobs in the long-term care industry would likely mean a sharp
cultural discontinuity between the client and the caregiver. . .
"Public
and Private Efforts to Develop a Qualified, Stable Frontline Workforce
"As
noted previously, recruiting and retaining frontline long-term care workers have
become a priority for many states. State
initiatives have included the following options:
"*
Establishing 'wage pass-throughs,' in which a state designates some portion of a
public long-term care program's reimbursement increase to be used specifically
to increase wages and/or benefits for frontline workers.
*
Increasing worker fringe benefits, such as health insurance and payment for
transportation time.
*
Developing career ladders by establishing additional job levels in public
programs, training requirements, or reimbursement decisions.
*
Increasing and improving training requirements.
* Developing new worker pools, including former welfare recipients.
*
Establishing public authorities to provide independent workers and consumers
ways to address issues about wages and benefits, job quality, and security.
"Providers,
too, are experimenting with a range of interventions. The literature contains numerous descriptions of programs in
nursing home and home care settings that have attempted to address recruitment
and retention (although few such programs have been evaluated) . . .
"Developing
a Research and Demonstration Agenda
"This
broad overview of long-term care frontline worker issues has identified a number
of knowledge and information gaps that need to be addressed to further the
development of a qualified, sustainable workforce:
We need a better understanding of the sources of the problem, the effects
of policy interventions, and which elements in different approaches succeed and
fail. We need an updated profile of
the frontline workforce in all long-term care settings that describes their
demographic characteristics, wages and benefits, geographic distribution, levels
of education, and health literacy. Policy-makers
need to better understand the magnitude of the long-term problem so that they
are more motivated in developing this workforce, the barriers to doing so, and
the possible consequences of different policy interactions.
Research is needed to assess state strategies' effectiveness at
ameliorating the short-term crisis, as well as to determine whether such
strategies as wage passthroughs could be replicated successfully.
Finally, we need to develop and test creative ways of developing new
pools of workers to meet the demand for services in the future. Federal
and state agencies and private foundations have begun to invest in applied
research that will help provide some solutions. . .
"The
future of the frontline long-term care worker is, in many ways, a barometer for
the health of our aging communities. Stakeholders
at the federal, state, and local levels and in the public and private sectors
must come together to find creative solutions to this problem."
LTC
Comment: The foregoing analysis
makes the long-term care worker shortage sound much more complicated than it
really is. Think about it.
If you could make more money working in a Taco Bell with fresh vegetables
and soda pop than you can make working in a nursing home with blood and feces,
where would you submit your resume? That's
the choice potential long-term care workers face.
Why does long-term care pay so little?
Simple. America's long-term
care service delivery system is starved for financial oxygen because it is
overwhelmingly dependent on inadequate government reimbursement through Medicaid
and Medicare.
Stone
and Wiener observe that "Medicare and Medicaid account for almost
three-fifths of long-term care expenditures and therefore play a substantial
role in determining provider wages, benefits, and training opportunities."
True enough, but Medicaid and Medicare play a much larger role in
dragging down the LTC industry's ability to pay reasonable wages than this quote
suggests. Although Medicaid pays
only 48 percent of nursing home costs, it covers two-thirds of all nursing home
residents and nearly 80 percent of all patient days.
More than half of what CMS (formerly HCFA) reports as
"out-of-pocket" costs are really just "spend-through" of
Social Security benefits and other income by people already on Medicaid.
The critical point is that if Medicaid pays even $1 of a resident's care,
the facility gets the dismally low Medicaid reimbursement rate even if the
resident is paying the bulk of the bill "out of pocket."
Furthermore, only 27 percent of home care costs are paid out of the
patient's pocket. Medicare and
Medicaid pay most of the rest.
Although
assisted living is 90 percent private pay and therefore market driven, the
assisted living industry was slow to develop for decades and demand for its
services remains impeded. Why?
Many seniors who could afford assisted living by liquidating the value of
their homes (80 percent of seniors own their homes and 80 percent of those own
them free and clear) choose instead (or the choice is made for them by heirs) to
go to nursing homes on Medicaid. Of
course, Medicaid exempts the home and all contiguous property regardless of
value.
Thus,
the long-term care worker shortage--like the other problems challenging the
long-term care industry--is largely self-inflicted by well-intentioned, but
perversely counterproductive public policy.
By creating a public financing monopsony in long-term care, policy makers
have choked off the market's ability to determine the value people are willing
to place on quality long-term care when they are left free to vote with their
own dollars for what they want the market to provide. Of course, the problem and the solution are much more
complicated than we can go into here, so check out the Center's public policy
proposal called "LTC Choice: A
Simple, Cost-Free Solution to the Long-Term Care Financing Puzzle" at http://www.centerltc.com/pubs/CLTCFReport.pdf
and let us know what you think.