LTCI Awareness — on the Cheap

Elsewhere in the article, Alonso-Zaldivar notes that, “Nursing home charges can run more than $200 a day and a home health aide averages $450 a week, usually part-time. Yet Medicare doesn’t cover long-term care, and only about 3 percent of adults have a private policy.”

Democrats put the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA) in honor of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who was dying of cancer as the bill was being drafted and had worked for decades to try to create some kind of long-term care (LTC) benefits program.

The PPACA CLASS program is supposed to be a voluntary, self-supporting, participant-paid program that would be open to all workers and provide a modest daily benefit for plan participants who end up needing help with the activities of daily living.

Critics in the LTCI and elsewhere argued that offering a voluntary program without medical underwriting could lead to a rapid death spiral, with sick participants driving up claims costs and premiums and driving the healthy participants out of the program.

U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced earlier this month that HHS experts agree with the outside critics and see no way to make the current version of the program work.