Harris-Walz Campaign Releases Proposal to Add Home Care to Medicare
(Oct. 22, 2024) On Oct. 8th, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a proposal to add home care to the Medicare program. The proposal is to add at-home services provided by home health aides, personal care attendants, or other qualified direct care workers with activities of daily living (ADL) based on a clinical assessment of need. Sources say that those with two or more ADL needs or serious cognitive impairment would be eligible for care. Under the proposal, these services would be offered at 20 hours or fewer a week, and there would be cost sharing with a sliding scale.
This would be the first major expansion to Medicare since the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act. The proposal also includes language around “lifting up care workers,” but there is not much detail about what this would entail. The proposal builds on recent research from the Brookings Institution and from Georgetown University. The campaign proposes to pay for this new benefit by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices for all drugs, not just the limited number authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act, but it is not clear how much the additional benefits under the Harris plan would cost.
While LeadingAge NY looks forward to more detail on the initiative, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has been sending a different message on funding the post-acute care side of home care. For several years now, CMS has taken significant steps to reduce fee-for-service payment rates for home health providers.
The Fact Sheet for the proposal is here. LeadingAge National's statement is here. We will keep members apprised of this initiative.
Contact: Meg Everett, meverett@leadingageny.org, 518-867-8871