A National Examination Of Long-Term Care Setting, Outcomes, And Disparities Among Elderly Dual Eligibles
Published: | 5:27 pm | Posted in: LTC Workforce Issues
The benefits of expanding funding for Medicaid long-term care home and community-based services (HCBS) relative to institutional care are often taken as self-evident. However, little is known about the outcomes of these services, especially for racial and ethnic minority groups, whose members tend to use the services more than whites do, and for people with […]
The Financial Burden Of Paid Home Care On Older Adults: Oldest And Sickest Are Least Likely To Have Enough Income
Published: | 9:32 pm | Posted in: Long-Term Care
Paid home care can significantly improve the lives of older adults with disabilities and their families, but recipients often incur substantial out-of-pocket spending. We simulated the financial burden of paid home care for a nationally representative sample of non-Medicaid community-dwelling adults ages sixty-five and older. We found that 74 percent could fund at least two years […]
Financing Long-Term Services And Supports: Options Reflect Trade-Offs For Older Americans And Federal Spending
Published: | 4:09 pm | Posted in: Long-Term Care
About half of older Americans will need a high level of assistance with routine activities for a prolonged period of time. This help is commonly referred to as long-term services and supports (LTSS). Under current policies, these individuals will fund roughly half of their paid care out of pocket. Partly as a result of high […]
Retirement Prospects for the Millennials: What is the Early Prognosis?
Published: | 3:37 pm | Posted in: Social Security
Various policy developments and long-term economic, social, and demographic trends raise worrisome questions about the financial security of future retirees. An erosion in employer-sponsored defined benefit pension coverage and the increase in Social Security’s full retirement age could shrink future benefits. Stagnating employment and earnings for men could threaten future retirement security, because retirement benefits […]
Will the Financial Fragility of Retirees Increase?
Published: | 9:33 pm | Posted in: Retirement Security
The elderly have long been seen as financially fragile, meaning that they may be ill-equipped to absorb a financial shock. The key reason is that, once retired, they have little ability to increase their income compared to working households. Going forward, retirees will get less of their income from Social Security and traditional pensions and […]
Why Are So Many Households Unable to Cover a $400 Unexpected Expense?
Published: | 8:40 pm | Posted in: Poverty
Despite a strong economic recovery, about 40 percent of households in 2017 still said they would have trouble paying for a $400 unexpected expense. When households are operating under such a tight budget, building a nest egg for retirement can be challenging. This brief uses data from two Federal Reserve surveys – the Survey of […]
Trends in Retirement Security by Race/Ethnicity
Published: | 5:35 pm | Posted in: Minority Aging, Welfare, Inequality, and Poverty
Retirement security has declined in the wake of the global financial crisis and ensuing recession. Despite an extended period of recovery, half of households ages 30-59 are at risk of inadequate retirement income compared to 44 percent in 2007. The questions addressed in this brief are how the percentage at risk varies by race/ethnicity in […]
Media and Mental Illness in a Post-Truth Era
Published: | 9:00 pm | Posted in: Mental Health
It has been argued convincingly that the public’s primary source of information about mental illness is the media: news, entertainment, and the echo chamber of social media. These depictions cue, frame, and otherwise guide our interpretive frameworks in both obvious and subtle ways. Visual media may be especially compelling and impactful in guiding social awareness, […]
Will Fewer Children Boost Demand for Formal Caregiving?
Published: | 7:28 pm | Posted in: Health Care Policy and Reform
Today, 25 percent of all caregivers of elderly are adult children. However, while the parents of the Baby Boom generation had three children per household on average, the Boomers themselves only have two. This project uses the Health and Retirement Study to assess how the number of children a person has affects the demand for formal long-term […]
Assessment of 3-dimensional wisdom in schizophrenia: Associations with neuropsychological functions and physical and mental health
Published: | 5:44 pm | Posted in: Mental Health
Recent decades have seen growing empirical research in wisdom as a complex, trait-based psychological characteristic. Wisdom has been shown to possess individual and societal benefits through associations with health and well-being, but it has not yet been evaluated in people with schizophrenia (PwS). In the current study, we administered a widely used, validated 3-dimensional wisdom […]
Care and its constraints: Will care work pass through Pettit’s gate?
Published: | 4:13 pm | Posted in: Caregiving
Welfare states are in a care crisis both in the sense of a practical care gap (abundant needs but not enough caregivers) and in the new movement to limit care to mere rehabilitation. Few political theorists pay attention to these developments, and those who do say little about the potential limits to care. This article […]
The Affordable Care Act and the Faltering Revolution in Behavioral Health Care
Published: | 3:20 pm | Posted in: Mental Health
Often described in such terms as a “revolution” and a “game-changer” for the behavioral health sector in the United States, the Affordable Care Act has helped to enhance coverage for mental health and substance use disorders while encouraging service system innovations at the organizational level. However, tens of millions of Americans still lack health insurance, […]
Competition in Health Insurance: A comprehensive study of U.S. markets
Published: | 3:04 pm | Posted in: Health Care Policy and Reform
This is the 17th edition of the American Medical Association’s “Competition in health insurance: A comprehensive study of U.S. markets.” This report presents new data on the degree of competition in health insurance markets across the country, It is intended to help researchers, policymakers, and federal and state regulators identify markets where consolidation among health […]
State Policies And Enrollees’ Experiences In Medicaid: Evidence From A New National Survey
Published: | 9:20 pm | Posted in: Medicaid
Medicaid provides health insurance to more than seventy million Americans, yet there has been little systematic analysis of what factors influence enrollees’ satisfaction with and access to care. Using a nationally representative survey of more than 270,000 Medicaid enrollees in 2014–15, we examined the consumer perspective on care in Medicaid. Average satisfaction ratings were 7.9 […]
Flint: An American Failure
Published: | 9:25 pm | Posted in: Neoliberalism
The story of Flint—the Michigan city in which people were harmed by drinking water that contained lead and lethal bacteria—is a warning to all struggling US communities that confront disinvestment, declining population, excessive financial focus, incompetent leadership, nontransparent government, and racism. Flint is also a tale of a persevering community, good doctors and scientists, and […]
Developing Care: Recent Research on the Care Economy and Economic Development
Published: | 8:00 pm | Posted in: Poverty and Public Policy
Policy makers are beginning to appreciate the constraints that unpaid care work imposes on both economic development and the empowerment of women in low-income countries. Empirical research on these topics is in its infancy but is already yielding significant results. This paper contextualizes and reviews recent research on unpaid care work in the Global South, […]
Medicaid blues: Hospitals, insurers wage political battle over managed-care dollars
Published: | 7:53 pm | Posted in: MLTC
“That’s all I have to say about that—I have to go bury the dead,” undertaker Stephen Holland said after listing his grievances with his state’s Medicaid politics early one Friday morning in June. Holland is one of a handful of white Democrats left in Mississippi’s House of Representatives, and he helped shape the past 20 […]
Managed Medicaid Long-Term Services and Supports is the Answer, But What is the Question?
Published: | 5:08 pm | Posted in: MLTC
A Presentation for the Annual Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, November 2018: Medicaid expenditures (25%) continue to dominate state policy HCBS Waivers Have Grown Dramatically over the past two decades The expansion means that HCBS and Nursing Homes need to be managed States have been trying to shift risk– financial and management to […]
The American Economy Is Rigged
Published: | 7:09 pm | Posted in: Inequality
Americans are used to thinking that their nation is special. In many ways, it is: the U.S. has by far the most Nobel Prize winners, the largest defense expenditures (almost equal to the next 10 or so countries put together) and the most billionaires (twice as many as China, the closest competitor). But some examples […]
Projected Coding Intensity In Medicare Advantage Could Increase Medicare Spending By $200 Billion Over Ten Years
Published: | 7:19 pm | Posted in: Medicare Advantage
Over the past decade, the average risk score for Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollees has risen steadily relative to that for fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries, by approximately 1.5 percent per year. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) uses patient demographic and diagnostic information to calculate a risk score for each beneficiary, and these risk scores are […]