 LTC Bullet: Rebalancing Long-Term Care Monday, March 5, 2012 Alpine, Texas— LTC Comment: Will rebalancing from nursing homes to home care save Medicaid money or drive up utilization and costs? How will rebalancing Medicaid affect the private LTC insurance market? Answers after the ***news.***
*** HOST STEVE MOSES: “By hosting an informative event, a Florida agent developed 16 B-to-B prospects, with two multi-life sales in the works. The relationship George Braddock II developed with an expert in the burgeoning field of Long Term Care insurance created an opportunity for both of them recently. When Seattle-based LTC think-tank president Stephen Moses planned to pass through Florida on vacation, he contacted Braddock who quickly set up a lunch meeting, found a sponsor in his local Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC), and created a great hook to attract professionals involved in any aspect of financial advising to attend. Offering a discussion of the CLASS Act provided the base for the two to reach out to Florida professionals to share valuable information and build Braddock's client base at the same time.” Details and “how to do it” appear in an article by Jennifer Samson on the Personal PR Forum (http://pprforum.ning.com/) here. *** *** REGISTRATION IS OPEN for the 12th Annual Intercompany Long-Term Care Insurance Conference to be held March 18-21, 2012 at the Paris and Bally’s Hotels in Las Vegas. Check the hotels for special rates. Click here or on the banner above for all the details and to register. Some highlights: * Apply for a (non-home-office) agent scholarship at
a special $395 rate
here. *** LTCI PRODUCERS SUMMIT early discounted registration ends March 15. Register here. KNIGHT KIPLINGER, editor-in-chief of The Kiplinger Letter and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine will keynote the 2012 American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance industry Summit to be held November 10-12 at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. Details here: http://www.aaltci.org/2012summit/conference.html. “The Summit takes place a week after Election Day and Mr. Kiplinger’s outlook for the U.S. economy and personal financial products couldn’t come at a better time,” declares Jesse Slome, executive director of the organization. *** ----------------- LTC BULLET: REBALANCING LONG-TERM CARE LTC Comment: A month ago, we published LTC Bullet: How to Fix Long-Term Care, which provided an overview of the LTC problem and its solution. Three weeks ago, we published LTC Bullet: The History of Long-Term Care Financing or How We Got into This Mess, which explained how the richest country in the world came to have a welfare-financed, nursing-home-based long-term care system. Two weeks ago, in LTC Bullet: Medicaid LTC Eligibility, we described how easy Medicaid LTC benefits are to obtain after care is needed without substantial asset spend down. More importantly, we explained why it matters. Last week, in LTC Bullet: Medicaid Planning for Long-Term Care, we tackled the controversial topic of how affluent people artificially self-impoverish to qualify for Medicaid LTC benefits and what the government has attempted unsuccessfully to discourage the practice. This week we address the question of whether or not Medicaid can save money by funding more home care and less nursing home care. Could Medicaid’s providing more services people want and less care they would rather avoid . . . attract more recipients, increase overall costs, further desensitize the public to LTC risk and crowd out private financing alternatives? In the weeks ahead, we will cover the complicated issue of “dual eligibles” and how to unleash the potential of private LTC financing alternatives such as long-term care insurance and home equity conversion. In other words, stick with us through this entire series of six Briefing Papers and we’ll show you step by step how America’s LTC system came to be so dysfunctional, why it has been so hard to fix until now, and exactly what to do to improve it. --------------
Dedicated to ensuring quality long-term care for all Americans Briefing Paper #4: By Stephen A. Moses Is Rebalancing a Panacea?Briefing Paper #1 in this series on "The History of Long-Term Care Financing" explained how Medicaid's bias toward funding nursing home care crowded out a privately financed home and community-based services (HCBS) market. Since the 1980s Medicaid has gradually moved away from financing nursing home care toward paying for more HCBS. Will this change save money and improve the program as advocates of rebalancing insist? Or could it cost more and potentially harm access and quality? What are the downside risks? Institutional Bias Gives WayThe federal Medicaid LTC program started in 1965. To win industry support, the new program originally paid exclusively and generously for nursing home care. But exploding costs and declining quality led in time to calls for Medicaid to "deinstitutionalize" or "rebalance" LTC benefits. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 authorized HCBS waivers which allowed state Medicaid programs to fund home care with restrictions. For example, states couldn't spend more for HCBS than they would have spent for nursing home care. The Supreme Court's 1999 "Olmstead" decision held that people with disabilities have the right to live at home or in the community if they are able and do not prefer nursing home care. Olmstead encouraged states to provide more HCBS within reasonable budget limitations. Major initiatives during the George W. Bush Administration expanded opportunities for state Medicaid programs to cover HCBS. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 and the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (health reform) added options and funding to encourage rebalancing to HCBS. The Argument for RebalancingThe argument in favor of HCBS, made strenuously by many academic and policy experts, is that taking care of frail or chronically ill elders in their homes is much cheaper than in a nursing home. Therefore, rebalancing from skilled nursing facility (SNF) services to HCBS should save the state and federal Medicaid programs money while giving people more of what they want (home care) and less of what they would rather avoid (nursing home care). But is that true? ConsiderationsWhen compared to an elderly population for whom traditionally available care is offered, recipients of expanded community-based services do not use significantly fewer days of nursing home care.[1]
An increasingly large number of studies, including the results of a national channeling demonstration program, have shown that non-institutional services typically do not substitute for nursing home care, but, rather, represent additional services most often to new populations.[2]
Although community-based LTC programs proved beneficial to both clients and informal caregivers in the LTC demonstrations, they did not prove budget neutral or cost effective.[3]
The Channeling demonstration . . . found that, while community-care models were often welcome by recipients and their caregivers, they led to overall increases in public spending for long-term care.[4]
The primary argument for the cost savings potential of home care rests on a comparison of the average per person Medicaid expenditures for people in the community and in nursing homes. The average annual Medicaid expenditures for home care for older people and adults with physical disabilities ($8,355 in 2004) per person are dramatically less than average annual Medicaid expenditures ($27,650 in 2004) per person for nursing home care. This comparison, however, is incomplete because it does not address differences in disability levels, use of acute care services, and the exclusion of housing and room and board costs from home care expenditures. Thus, it is not strictly an 'apples to apples' comparison.[5]
For Medicaid to afford quality HCBS for all recipients it must have fewer recipients. By tightening eligibility, closing eligibility loopholes, preventing Medicaid planning, and enforcing estate recovery, the program can do a better job for fewer genuinely needy eligibles. When middle class and affluent people understand their savings and home equity are at risk for LTC, they will avoid Medicaid dependency by paying privately from savings, home equity conversion and private insurance. These points are developed more fully in Briefing Paper #5 on Dual Eligibles and Briefing Paper #6 on Private LTC Financing Alternatives.
[1]
General Accounting Office, "The Elderly Should Benefit From Expanded Home
Health Care But Increasing Those Services Will Not Insure Cost Reductions"
(Dec. 7, 1982) p. 43,
http://archive.gao.gov/f0102/120074.pdf.
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