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By 
May 10, 2023 at 04:53 PM
What You Need to Know
- Annual Medicare and Medicaid spending on dementia is about the same as the GDP of Greece.
- A federal advisory panel shapes how the country copes with dementia.
- Experts told the panel that Medicare should pay doctors a flat fee for each patient with dementia served.
- The experts also said that services for caregivers should be part of the dementia care package.
Medicare could eventually end up covering a new package of dementia care benefits comparable to the strategy used by UCLA Health’s Alzheimer’s and Dementia Care Program.
Rani Snyder, a vice president from the John A. Hartford Foundation, and three other experts on care for older adults cited the UCLA Health program as a model earlier this week when they presented a dementia care payment proposal in Washington, at a meeting of the federal Advisory Council on Alzheimer’s Research, Care and Services.
Snyder and colleagues — including Dr. David Reuben of the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Health Sciences — recommended that Medicare cover care for the family caregivers of people with dementia as well as the people with dementia; put the people with dementia in categories based on the severity of their illness; and pay doctors a flat fee for each individual with a given level of dementia served.
If Medicare ends up covering all of the services included in the recommendations, dementia care teams could end up talking about services that could be provided by insurance agents and financial advisors when they counsel caregivers about community resources.
What It Means
Medicare could eventually do more to nudge people who already have dementia toward care centers that might talk to them about topics such as paying for care.
The Council
Federal and state governments will spend about $222 billion on dementia this year, and families will spend about $87 billion on dementia care out of pocket, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
U.S. state and federal spending on dementia is comparable to the 2021 gross domestic product of Greece, according to World Bank GDP figures.
Congress provided funding for the advisory council in a bill that was signed into law in 2010.
