Tag: Rep. Jan Schakowsky

Home Health Care Providers Struggle With State Laws And Medicare Rules As Demand Rises

“We can send prescriptions to the pharmacy, including [for] narcotics,” says Marie Grosh, a geriatric advanced practice nurse practitioner and the owner of a medical house calls practice in a Cleveland suburb. “We can order lab work, x-rays, ultrasounds, EKGs [electrocardiagrams]; interpret them; and treat patients based on that. But we’re just not allowed to order home care—which is absurd.”

By SUSAN JAFFE  | Health Affairs | June 2019 | Volume 38, Number 8

When Christine Williams began working as a nurse practitioner some forty years ago in Detroit, Michigan, older adults who couldn’t manage on their own and had no family nearby and no doctor willing to make house calls had few options besides  winding up in a nursing home.

Not anymore.

Home check: Nurse practitioner Marie Grosh visits Leroy Zacharias at his home in a Cleveland suburb, He has Parkinson disease, and Grosh says he would be living in a nursing home if he couldn’t get medical care at home. (Photo by Lynn Ischay.)

“The move towards keeping seniors in their homes is a fast-galloping horse here,” says Williams, who settled in Cleveland, Ohio, more than a decade ago. “We don’t have space for them in long-term care [facilities], they don’t want to be in long-term care, and states don’t want to pay for long-term care. And everybody wants to live at home.”

But despite the growing desire for in-home medical care for older adults from nearly all quarters, seniors’ advocates and home health professionals claim that rules set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)  along with  state regulations have created an obstacle course for the very providers best positioned—and sometimes the only option—to offer that care.  [Continued here] …

Home-Care Workers

Susan Jaffe | Washington Correspondent for The Lancet | 28 August 2015

Home-care workers are excluded from the federal law requiring most employees to receive a minimum wage—currently $7·25 an hour—and 150% of that pay when they work overtime. After 40 years, the US Department of Labor (DOL) issued rules eliminating that exemption. The new rule was supposed to take effect last January but it was blocked by a lawsuit filed by associations representing companies that hire these workers. [Continued here.]  [with video of Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky shadowing home-care worker Gilda Pipersburgh]…

50 Years of Medicare

lancet cover 2Volume 386, Issue 9992,  1 August 2015

WORLD REPORT    In July, 1965, Medicare, America’s landmark national health insurance programme, became law. Today, it covers 55 million people.  Susan Jaffe, The Lancet’s Washington correspondent,  reports.

LBJ Lancet 073015

An American woman thanks President Lyndon Johnson for Medicare, April, 1965.

Richard Troeh joined a very busy solo family medicine practice in 1966 but even with two doctors, their offi ce in Independence, Missouri, seemed just as hectic. The year before, President Lyndon Baines Johnson came to town to sign the Medicare legislation into law at the Truman library. Former President Harry Truman—an advocate of national health insurance since the 1940s—and his wife attended the event and were among the fi rst Americans to receive Medicare cards.
50 years later, the Social Security Amendments of 1965 provide health care for 55 million people older than 65 years or disabled receiving Medicare and nearly 73 million low-income adults, children, pregnant women, and people with disabilities receiving Medicaid, an optional programme also created under the same law.
And in the process, the government programmes have transformed health care in the USA. Medicare is the nation’s largest single purchaser of health care, consuming 14% of last year’s federal budget, or US$505 billion. And it also has a fiercely loyal following that opposes efforts to cut benefits. Speaking earlier this month at the White House Conference on Aging, President Barack Obama drew laughs when he said, “And now we’ve got [protest] signs saying, “Get your government hands off of my Medicare”. [Continued in full text or PDF ] [listen to podcast here]
…