Date: 3/31/2009 7:21 PM
One option for addressing the high costs of long-term care is to buy an insurance policy. Policies can cover the cost of hiring someone to help the recipient with in-home cleaning, cooking, bathing and dressing.
Coverage may also include assisted living in a facility outside the home or could include nursing home care.
The AARP offers several tips if you’re considering long-term health care insurance.
1. Buy a policy when you’re still middle aged and before the onset of serious health problems. Waiting until you’re in your 70s or 80s or in failing health could mean insurers won’t sell you insurance or they’ll make premiums too expensive.
2. Balance your goals with the cost. Goals should include protecting your assets, minimizing your dependence on other family members, and controlling where and how you receive long-term care services. For a 65-year-old, a policy could cost between $2,000 and $3,000 a year to cover nursing home care and home care. You may choose not to buy a policy if it forces you to lower your quality of living or makes you give up things you need now.
3. Decide what coverage suits you best. Some pay only for nursing home care, others only for in-home care. Polices can be purchased to cover a mixture of options including home care (sometimes including care by a family member), assisted living or adult day care.
4. Look at the daily or monthly benefit, which shows limits to what the insurance company will pay. If the cost of your care exceeds these limits, you’ll have to pay the difference. Policies also will have a benefit period, which may be two years, six years, or the rest of your life.
5. Check to see what kind of inflation protection is included in the policy. Medical care expenses climb so rapidly that a lack of inflation protection may leave you paying a large portion of care yourself.
6. Make sure that your long-term care policy doesn’t require that you spend time in a hospital to receive benefits; that it will be renewed as long as you pay premiums; and that it lets you stop paying premiums once you begin receiving benefits. Also make sure it covers pre-existing conditions if you disclosed them when you applied.
7. Consider optional products including life insurance policies or annuities with long-term care benefit riders.
Sources: AARP: http://www.aarp.org/money/financial_planning/sessionfive/longter —ca re_insurance.html
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Seniors give Daschle health reform ideas
Date: 12/30/2008
By KEVIN FREKING
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Note to President-elect Barack Obama: Health reform doesn’t have to be all about expanding health insurance. It can be about the little things too, such as shorter waits in the doctor’s office and putting in place incentives such as free checkups that catch little problems before they became big ones.
That was the message Tuesday from two-dozen seniors who gave their views about what ails America’s health care system to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Obama’s choice for secretary of health and human services. They listed a broad range of concerns, from four-hour waits to see a doctor, to the high cost of prescription drugs, to lack of Medicare coverage for certain treatments and medical devices.
Daschle said conversations like Tuesday’s will put the new administration “on the right track” for overhauling the nation’s health care system next year.
Alethea Campbell said she wanted more emphasis on medical research, particularly for Alzheimer’s Disease. “My family is loaded with Alzheimer’s. I feel like I’m going to be a victim of it,” she said. “What is going to happen to me four or five years down the road. Who is going to take care of me?”
Eugene Kinlow wants greater emphasis on helping people live more healthy lifestyles. “A major part of the cost problem is us. We keep driving up the cost of health care, all of us, in our daily behavior and habits,” he said.
And Frederick Gore wants medical providers to be less concerned about how they’re going to be paid when a patient walks into their room with urgent medical conditions. “The other patients could see there was something wrong with me,” he said. “I’m sitting there and can barely breathe and he’s looking at how he’s going to get paid.”
Some 8,500 meetings similar to the one at the Congress Heights Senior Wellness Center have been held around the country since Dec. 15. Daschle attended his second such meeting Tuesday, along with his mother, Betty. Obama’s transition team will gather the information from those meetings and post the material on its Web site, http://change.gov. Daschle said the information would be used to help craft a health proposal.
Daschle said lawmakers will be more likely to take up health reform if there is enough pressure from voters. In a book published earlier this year, he urged the next president to quickly capitalize on the good will that comes with a new administration. He said the meetings will add to the sense of urgency.
“It will lead to members of Congress taking note. It will lead to governors taking note,” Daschle said in an interview. “It’s going to lead to a greater degree of commitment on the part of elected people.”
About 25 people talked to Daschle about the problems they’ve confronted with the health care system. Most participate in Medicare, the government’s health insurance program for the elderly and disabled.
Although they had coverage for most treatments, they were not short of suggestions for improving the health care system. Some described waiting three or four hours before they could be seen by a doctor. Others talked of how they helped pay health care costs for uninsured children and grandchildren. And some longed for a return of the days when teenagers volunteered to work at the local hospital or at local senior centers.
“It’s conversations like this that put us on the right track,” Daschle told the audience. “It’s discussions like this that give us a better understanding of how it should be done.”
The public meetings orchestrated by Obama’s transition team resemble an effort that took place in 2005 and 2006. Congress created its Citizens Health Care Working Group that heard from 6,650 people at 84 meetings around the country and more than 14,000 in an Internet survey.
The group’s recommendations were not acted on. The recommendations included guaranteeing health coverage for specific checkups and treatments and protecting consumers from high medical expenses.
Daschle said the health care system’s problems have only grown since then, which could ensure action in Congress.
“We wouldn’t have had 8,500 of these discussions in a two-week period over the Christmas holidays a few years ago. This is an indication of the degree of severity and concern that people have all over the country,” Daschle said.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By KEVIN FREKING
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Note to President-elect Barack Obama: Health reform doesn’t have to be all about expanding health insurance. It can be about the little things too, such as shorter waits in the doctor’s office and putting in place incentives such as free checkups that catch little problems before they became big ones.
That was the message Tuesday from two-dozen seniors who gave their views about what ails America’s health care system to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Obama’s choice for secretary of health and human services. They listed a broad range of concerns, from four-hour waits to see a doctor, to the high cost of prescription drugs, to lack of Medicare coverage for certain treatments and medical devices.
Daschle said conversations like Tuesday’s will put the new administration “on the right track” for overhauling the nation’s health care system next year.
Alethea Campbell said she wanted more emphasis on medical research, particularly for Alzheimer’s Disease. “My family is loaded with Alzheimer’s. I feel like I’m going to be a victim of it,” she said. “What is going to happen to me four or five years down the road. Who is going to take care of me?”
Eugene Kinlow wants greater emphasis on helping people live more healthy lifestyles. “A major part of the cost problem is us. We keep driving up the cost of health care, all of us, in our daily behavior and habits,” he said.
And Frederick Gore wants medical providers to be less concerned about how they’re going to be paid when a patient walks into their room with urgent medical conditions. “The other patients could see there was something wrong with me,” he said. “I’m sitting there and can barely breathe and he’s looking at how he’s going to get paid.”
Some 8,500 meetings similar to the one at the Congress Heights Senior Wellness Center have been held around the country since Dec. 15. Daschle attended his second such meeting Tuesday, along with his mother, Betty. Obama’s transition team will gather the information from those meetings and post the material on its Web site, http://change.gov. Daschle said the information would be used to help craft a health proposal.
Daschle said lawmakers will be more likely to take up health reform if there is enough pressure from voters. In a book published earlier this year, he urged the next president to quickly capitalize on the good will that comes with a new administration. He said the meetings will add to the sense of urgency.
“It will lead to members of Congress taking note. It will lead to governors taking note,” Daschle said in an interview. “It’s going to lead to a greater degree of commitment on the part of elected people.”
About 25 people talked to Daschle about the problems they’ve confronted with the health care system. Most participate in Medicare, the government’s health insurance program for the elderly and disabled.
Although they had coverage for most treatments, they were not short of suggestions for improving the health care system. Some described waiting three or four hours before they could be seen by a doctor. Others talked of how they helped pay health care costs for uninsured children and grandchildren. And some longed for a return of the days when teenagers volunteered to work at the local hospital or at local senior centers.
“It’s conversations like this that put us on the right track,” Daschle told the audience. “It’s discussions like this that give us a better understanding of how it should be done.”
The public meetings orchestrated by Obama’s transition team resemble an effort that took place in 2005 and 2006. Congress created its Citizens Health Care Working Group that heard from 6,650 people at 84 meetings around the country and more than 14,000 in an Internet survey.
The group’s recommendations were not acted on. The recommendations included guaranteeing health coverage for specific checkups and treatments and protecting consumers from high medical expenses.
Daschle said the health care system’s problems have only grown since then, which could ensure action in Congress.
“We wouldn’t have had 8,500 of these discussions in a two-week period over the Christmas holidays a few years ago. This is an indication of the degree of severity and concern that people have all over the country,” Daschle said.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Hospitals ease ER crowding with ward beds in halls
Date: 10/26/2008
By CARLA K. JOHNSON
Associated Press Writer
“They sent me up here to make room for other emergency patients,” Gray, 78, said last week from his bed in the hall of a New York area hospital. “This is the way things are in hospitals.”
It may not sound like ideal health care, but hospital officials nationwide are being urged to consider hallway medicine as a way to ease emergency department crowding, and some are trying it.
Leading the way is Stony Brook University Medical Center at Stony Brook, N.Y., where a study found that no harm was caused by moving emergency room patients to upper-floor hallways when they were ready for admission.
The study’s lead author says all hospitals should look at the program’s success.
“This is yet another battle cry for hospitals to get off their duffs and stop stacking people knee deep in the emergency department,” said Dr. Peter Viccellio, who is clinical director of the hospital’s emergency department.
He is to present the study’s findings Tuesday at a meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians in Chicago.
Crowding is a hospital-wide problem that has been handed off to emergency departments, Viccellio said. His idea hands the problem back to the entire hospital.
Before the change, when his hospital filled up, patients were admitted but held in the ER in a common practice called boarding. On busy days, “things would grind to a halt and people would wait to be seen,” Viccellio said. Infectious patients would wait in the ER’s hallway for isolation rooms to open up elsewhere in the hospital.
Holding patients in ERs can cause deaths, doctors say. In a 2007 survey of nearly 1,500 emergency doctors, 13 percent said they personally experienced a patient dying as a result of boarding in the emergency department. The survey was conducted by the American College of Emergency Physicians.
The new study found slightly fewer deaths and intensive care unit admissions in the hallway patients compared to the standard bed patients. That was no surprise, Viccellio said, because the protocol calls for giving the first available rooms to the sickest patients. Intensive care patients never go to hallways.
The study is based on four years of Stony Brook’s experience with more than 2,000 patients admitted to hallways from the ER.
Other hospitals resist the idea, doctors say. Dr. Michael Carius, who heads the emergency department at Norwalk Hospital in Norwalk, Conn., would like it adopted at his hospital. But nurses and government regulators have resisted, citing safety issues, “as though the emergency department hallway is a safer environment,” he said in frustration.
“When you’re full of admitted patients, you’re no longer an emergency department, you’re just a holding area,” Carius said.
In Texas, all it took to convince nurses at Harris Methodist Fort Worth Hospital was a tour of the ER, said Barbara VanWart, emergency nurse manager.
“They could see the problem and help us make things happen because now it’s before their eyes,” VanWart said. The hospital started its hallway protocol in 2005.
Dr. Kirk Jensen of the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass., said the best reason to adopt the concept is the way it gets the whole hospital involved in finding rooms more quickly for admitted patients.
“It’s out of sight, out of mind, even if they know that patients are there in the emergency department,” Jensen said. With patients in their own hallways, “they get a lot more creative and aggressive with workflow practices.”
When Stony Brook began the hallway practice, the staff noticed “the miracle of the elevator,” said Carolyn Santora, who heads the hospital’s patient safety efforts. Somehow, rooms became available by the time hallway-bound emergency patients made it upstairs, she said.
Nurses hate seeing patients in their hallways, Santora said, and that’s fine with her.
“I want them to hate it. I want them to do everything to expedite flow to get the patient out of hallway.”
Gray, the hallway patient at Stony Brook, came to the ER with chest pains and was stabilized before being sent upstairs. He is a retired nurse and said hospital crowding deserves attention from lawmakers.
“I wish the $700 billion went for hospitals, roads and bridges and not to bail out those folks on Wall Street,” he said.
___
On the Net:
ACEP: http://www.acep.org/
Stony Brook: http://www.stonybrookmedicalcenter.org/
Institute for Healthcare Improvement: http://www.ihi.org/ihi/
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.