crown89 Harris Proposes Medicare Benefits for Home Care, Vision and Hearing

Vice President Kamala Harris outlined a new proposal for home health care on “The View” on Tuesday, describing a Medicare expansion plan that she said would help what is called the “sandwich generation” to take care of aging parents.

That constituency includes many adults who find themselves straddling the responsibility of rearing their children at the same time that their parents need more assistance to stay at home.

“There are so many people who are right in the middle,” said Ms. Harris on the ABC talk show.

She recalled caring for her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, before she died of cancer in 2009. “It’s about dignity for that individual. It’s about independence for that individual,” she said.

Home health services that last more than a few months represent “the biggest gap in Medicare,” said David Grabowski, a health policy professor at Harvard who studies long-term care. Medicaid, the federal-state program for the poor, covers home care for elderly and disabled Americans who need it, but people are forced to spend all their savings to qualify and often face long waiting periods.

The Harris campaign said that the plan would be paid for with savings from the expansion of Medicare price negotiations with drug manufacturers, which is expected to lower government spending for older people’s prescriptions. But it is not clear how much the additional benefits under the Harris plan would cost.

“This would be transformative from a care perspective,” Mr. Grabowski said, but he added that the price could be very high. “There will be a lot of sticker shock once this is costed out.”

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