Harris’ ‘Medicare at Home’ Plan Would Fail To Make At-Home Care Affordable
During an appearance on The View earlier this month, Vice President Kamala Harris unveiled a new plan to expand home care for elderly and disabled Americans through Medicare. While Harris’ campaign did not provide a budget, similar proposals have been estimated to cost about $40 billion per year. Harris says that her plan would be funded by redirecting wasteful Medicare spending, but experts warn that it would create further inefficiencies in the system and cost taxpayers billions.
Harris marketed the plan as a “historic new Medicare at Home benefit” meant to ease the stress on those she calls the “sandwich generation,” referring to millennials caught in between having to care for both their aging parents and their children.
According to the plan’s fact sheet, home care would be covered either completely or partially on a “sliding scale for cost-sharing” for higher-income seniors. Medicaid already covers more than half of long-term care services in the U.S. for low-income Americans with minimal cost sharing. With Medicare already in financial decline, adding a new benefits package would send the program into further disarray.
The price tag of the program would be covered by expanding “Medicare drug negotiations,” more coverage for “certain brand-name drugs,” a crackdown on “pharmaceutical benefit managers (PBMs)” to increase transparency, and implementing “international tax reform” to disincentivize companies from shipping jobs overseas.
Creating a universal in-home care program would disproportionately favor the wealthy by forcing poorer families to foot the bill for in-home care. With a “free” program, Americans would also be disincentivized from saving for future care, which would hurt long-term savings rates in the U.S., according to Mark J. Warshawsky, a
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