Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Stephen Moses on Superman and Long-Term Care
["LTC Bullet: Of Superman, Bedsores and Nursing Home Litigation," The Center for Long-Term Care Financing, 3 November 2004.]
According to The New York Times, Christopher Reeve's recent passing may have been brought on by a bedsore - a common problem among those paralyzed, and as Stephen Moses points out, among those in long-term care facilities as well:
If Christopher Reeve, who could afford the best possible long-term care, can succumb to complications from a pressure sore, how can we expect nursing homes to eliminate such complications for Medicaid residents when Medicaid pays nursing homes $4.1 billion short of break-even annually and liability insurance costs are consuming most of the meager reimbursement increases Medicaid occasionally provides?
People need to wake up and realize that already, but far more so in the future, access to quality long-term care--especially home and community-based care--will depend on the ability to pay privately for such care.
Juries need to realize that bad outcomes in nursing homes are not necessarily caused by greedy owners or corporate bureaucrats unwilling to pay for quality care. Bad outcomes usually reflect systemic problems caused by excessive dependency on inadequate government financing.
Policy makers and tax payers need to realize that the same lawyers artificially impoverishing affluent seniors to qualify them for Medicaid nursing home care are often the same practitioners suing nursing homes for providing allegedly poor care to their Medicaid-underfinanced residents.
Until we understand the complicated, deep-seated connections between these superficially unrelated facets of the long-term care problem, we'll have little hope to improve care quality.
[Stephen A. Moses, "Project Proposal: Controlling Medicaid Long-Term Care Costs," Submitted to Members of the Kansas State Legislature, The Flint Hills Center, January 2004.]
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