elder law outlines

Millions of Seniors Could Lose Medicaid LTC Coverage Under GOP Plan, Reports Warn

After the fierce backlash against their plan to privatize Medicare, Republican strategists are focusing on their proposal to cut $750 billion from Medicaid. Ironically, policy experts say that scheme would have a much greater impact on today's elderly and near-elderly than the Medicare proposal ever would. A flurry of analyses released by different groups paint an alarming picture of millions of nursing home residents and those who receive long-term care at home losing Medicaid coverage over the next decade if the Republican plan becomes law.

"This is a huge deal for the nation's seniors, and it's been largely unrecognized," Jocelyn Guyer, the co-executive director of the Center for Children and Families at the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, told the New York Times .

The plans for Medicaid, part of the budget bill recently passed by the Republican-led House, would turn Medicaid funding to states into a "block grant," something proposed by George W. Bush in 2003 and by Newt Gingrich in 1995.

Under the current system, the federal government matches every dollar that states spend on Medicaid, no matter how high the total goes. Under the House Republican plan, starting in 2013 states would receive a fixed amount every year, which would only increase with population growth and the overall cost of living, not health care costs. If a state's Medicaid costs are higher than its block grant will cover, the state would have to make up the difference, either by spending more of its own money or by restricting eligibility for Medicaid (including nursing home coverage), reducing covered services, or cutting payment rates to health care providers. The Republican plan would make it easier for states to cut benefits and limit eligibility by giving them more flexibility in designing their Medicaid programs than it now permits.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the federal block grants would not come close to meeting states' needs. The Office predicts that by 2022 federal funding for Medicaid would fall 35 percent below what the federal government now is projected to provide states, and the shortfall would be 49 percent by 2030. Eight states -- including Florida, Colorado and Georgia -- would lose more than 40 percent of their federal funding for Medicaid over the next decade, according to a separate analysis by the Urban Institute released by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Elder Law | Elder Law Expert: Ryan Plan Would Fundamentally Change ...

Posted on: Friday, 8 April 2011, 13:49 CDT

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s offer to change Medicare for those beneath age 55 is nothing partial of a full reconceptualization of the illness insurance program, says a University of Illinois elder law expert.

Richard L. Kaplan, a highbrow of law and consultant on early retirement issues, says the Ryan offer would throw Medicare’s stream defined-benefit module in preference of a defined-contribution understanding in that the supervision would supply seniors with a stipulated amount of allowance to buy illness insurance from in isolation insurers.

“The Ryan offer would remove the package of benefits that everybody receives but would enable seniors to select from a accumulation of skeleton with not similar benefits, not similar premiums and not similar co-payment obligations,” Kaplan said.

Kaplan, the Peer and Sarah Pedersen Professor of Law at Illinois, says that what Rep. Ryan is proposing isn’t a in essence new idea, as a broadly similar outline was initial deliberate at length during the Clinton administration.

“It was draft beneath the pretension of ‘premium support,’ even though sometimes it has been described as vouchers,” he said. “Essentially, it’s the same rational ” supply seniors with a directed towards amount of allowance and let them emporium is to outline that most appropriate meets their needs.”

While there might be nothing new beneath the object in Washington, that doesn’t meant that a few seniors won’t advance out forward beneath the Ryan proposal.

“Some seniors will benefit, since they will be able to use their Medicare dollars for benefits that they prefer,” Kaplan said. “For example, Medicare now pays for particular sanatorium stays of 60 to 90 days in length. But the median sanatorium stay for someone 65 years and comparison is reduction than 6 days. So a potential Medicare enrollee might select a outline in the draft network that provides shorter sanatorium stay coverage but more endless home illness caring coverage than Medicare now includes.

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