The Patriot Post® · Harris's Bad Medicare Expansion Plan
Kamala Harris has struggled to define herself and differentiate her candidacy from Joe Biden. And if she winds up losing the election, one of the most infamous moments from her campaign will be her answer to a teed-up softball question while on “The View.”
When host Sunny Hostin asked, “If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” Harris replied, “Uh, there is not a thing that comes to mind.”
However, prior to that response, Harris gave a rambling answer to Hostin’s earlier question regarding how she was different from Biden. In that answer, Harris mentioned home healthcare. Unfortunately for Harris, her rambling, meandering word salad took away from her attempt to create some buzz around a legitimate issue for many Americans.
The issue is tied to the ever-growing cost of healthcare. ObamaCare was touted as the solution to rising prices, but, as we have repeatedly noted, the law has only made the situation worse. Harris, who has backed off of the “Medicare for All” stance she held back in 2019, has latched onto the idea of expanding Medicare to cover long-term home-based healthcare, or LTC.
Under Harris’s plan, which would add $40 billion annually to the cost of Medicare, it would be used to cover the cost of home care providers. “According to the AARP,” notes Gregg Girvan of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, “family caregivers provided an estimated 36 billion hours of unpaid care in 2021, a contribution valued at $600 billion — far outpacing the $467 billion spent on formal long-term care (LTC). Family caregiving is prominent in the United States because paid LTC is exceptionally expensive. A private room in a nursing home can cost anywhere between $80,000 (in Texas) to nearly $200,000 (in Connecticut) annually. Many Americans simply aren’t prepared for such a financial burden, even though 70 percent of people over the age of 65 are likely to need LTC.”
The trouble is that Harris’s $40 billion cost estimate is far too optimistic. A full-time (44 hours a week) LTC costs roughly $75,000 annually, and that cost balloons to over $288,000 for a full-time live-in around-the-clock provider. Furthermore, an estimated 70% of Americans 65 and older will eventually need LTC. In short, Harris’s plan is a recipe for massively expanding government spending. As always, the number of people taking advantage of such coverage would increase beyond the current estimates.
Rather than seeking to expand Medicare, a more thoughtful approach would be to eliminate unneeded hurdles that hamper home healthcare providers and expand the cost. In other words, work to make LTC less expensive via regulatory changes rather than throwing more government money at the problem. And, of course, government money always comes with many strings attached, making it less valuable than it would be otherwise.
Harris has hit on a genuine issue, but her proposed solution promises to only make healthcare more costly. And that’s the nature of socialism: It never ends up costing less. Indeed, it increases inefficiency while costing more.