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Health Care Reform Should Not Hurt Elderly
By Rebecca Moore, NewsOk.com
July 24, 2009
As the White House and Congress debate ways to cut costs and improve quality in the nation’s health care system, it’s our patriotic duty to keep a close eye on the details and ensure that vulnerable citizens — such as the elderly — are not marginalized in the process.
Case in point: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has introduced a Bush-era regulation that would effectively cut Medicare nursing home funding in the United States by $1.05 billion in fiscal year 2010, $7.23 billion over five years and $18 billion over 10 years.
The proposed regulation would drop Medicare payments by as much as $53 billion over 10 years, an average loss of more than two years’ worth of Medicare revenue for every nursing home in America.
For Oklahoma’s 316 nursing homes and the nearly 20,000 people who reside there, cuts to Medicare of this magnitude would be catastrophic. Hundreds of key frontline care jobs would be eliminated, quality improvement programs would lose vital funding and, ultimately, important long-term care facilities that are already struggling due to chronic underfunding would have to close.
Nearly 100 nursing homes in Oklahoma have been forced to close since 2000 from a lack of funding. The number of people who need long-term care is rising at an amazing rate. Each facility that closes means fewer options for those who need skilled nursing home care.
According to the Census Bureau, the world’s 65-and-older population is projected to triple by 2050, growing from 516 million today to 1.53 billion.
During the same time span, the 85-and-older population is projected to increase more than fivefold, from 40 million to 219 million.
With these projected numbers, it isn’t difficult to see why those looking for ways to cut health care spending would like to consider cuts to long-term care.
A recent University of Chicago study found that health care spending increases after the age of 50 and continues to accelerate. The financial per capita burden at age 85 and older is nearly six times as high as the burden at ages 50 through 54. And expenditures on persons during their last two years of life account for 40 percent of all Medicare health expenditures.
Adequate, stable Medicare funding and patient outcomes go hand in hand, and our ability to maintain sufficient work force levels, to sustain comprehensive quality improvement programs and to continue caring for our patients and residents now and in the future is at stake.
The Oklahoma Association of Healthcare Providers strongly supports comprehensive health care reform and shares the goal of the administration and Congress to make quality health care more affordable and available. There is a right way and a wrong way to accomplish this goal. Cutting Medicare funding and diminishing choices and quality of care for our seniors at this critical time is most certainly the wrong way.
Moore is executive director of the Oklahoma Association of Health Care Providers.
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