About a decade ago, my mother’s slow mental decline became too obvious for our family to deny. She continued to live at home with my father under increasingly difficult circumstances until she fell and broke her hip. In the hospital, it became clear that her mental impairment precluded physical rehabilitation and that institutional care was unavoidable.
This is a standard baby boomer’s saga, and what came next was not unusual either. I soon learned that long-term care for institutional residents was a big-ticket item. My parents lived in Connecticut, a high-cost state. The place we chose—a “continuum of care” facility with independent living at the top and a nursing home at the bottom—cost more than $100,000 per year for a semi-private room. (The national average at the time was about $70,000, and it has since risen to $78,000, according to a Metropolitan Life survey.)
Although I had spent much of my life studying public policy, I had no idea how long-term care was financed. I soon learned that Medicare paid for at most 100 days of rehabilitation (useless in my mother’s case) and that Medicaid required beneficiaries to “spend down” nearly all their assets. Private long-term care insurance policies were available, I learned, but my parents—along with most Americans who can afford them—had not purchased one. Fortunately they had lived below their means for decades and had accumulated substantial assets, which proved sufficient to see my mother through nearly five years of full-time care.
I didn’t need to study wealth distribution tables to see that only a tiny fraction of American families could afford to do what my parents had done. The median family could self-finance only a few months of institutional care, after which they would be completely dependent on public resources. But Medicaid is devouring ever-increasing shares of hard-pressed state budgets, and huge federal budget deficits are putting pressure on the decades-old fiscal partnership between the states and the national government, and the pressure will only intensify in the decades ahead.
In this presidential election year, the impact of demographic change—especially the growing weight of immigrants and minorities—commands our attention. But another demographic change—the relentless aging of the U.S. population—will be far more consequential for national policy. Long-term care expenditures accounted for nearly one-third of Medicaid’s total outlays of $389 billion in 2010. As the population ages, the tension within Medicaid between caring for the elderly and the health needs of poor and near-poor families will escalate.
The problem is already acute. According to a recent report from the National Governors Association, Medicaid already constitutes the single largest share of state budgets—24 percent, a figure that rises relentlessly year by year. State spending on the program rose by 20 percent in the most recent reporting year and by even more—23 percent—in the previous year. The report estimated that by the end of fiscal year 2013, total Medicaid enrollment for low-income Americans and the dependent elderly will have risen by 12.5 percent in just three years. Because state revenues are growing much more slowly than Medicaid outlays, other priorities are getting squeezed. In many states, for example, public higher education—key not only to future prosperity and competitiveness but also to opportunity and mobility—is reaching a breaking point.
In short, there’s a looming crisis in long-term care because our current model for funding it is crumbling under the weight of multiple demands and inexorable demographic shifts. But we’re doing almost nothing to respond. It’s time to shift to a new long-term care model that combines personal responsibility and social insurance, the government and the market, in ways that would benefit not only current and future beneficiaries but the rest of society as a whole.
Commentary
Op-edThe Long Term Is Now
September 11, 2012