Search Results for: caregiver wages

Low Caregiver Wages Create Vicious Cycle

February 24, 2015 by Honey Leveen Leave a Comment

Higher wages are needed to sustain a viable home-care workforce, especially as demand for home services continues to grow with an aging population, home-care worker advocates have argued. A new study has just been published. Here’s the report (PDF), which demonstrates just how serious the wage issue is for home-care workers and those they serve.

An article in the February 18, 2015 edition of Modern Healthcare says we’re going to have a burgeoning number of Baby Boomers who’ll need home care. Most of them will unfortunately, be financially unprepared for long-term care. The article states, “Projections have estimated the number of Americans age 65 and older will more than double, from 40 million in 2010 to 88 million by 2050, according to HHS.”

Quoting again, because home care providers are currently paid such low (and actually declining) wages, “Three out of five of the country’s 2 million home-care aides rely on some type of public assistance through programs such as Medicaid, food stamps or help paying for housing and utilities.”

“The average hourly wage for home-care workers is around $9.61, for an annual median income of $13,000, just above the individual federal poverty level of $11,770.”

“Low pay, scarce worker benefits and limited opportunities for advancement have contributed to an annual turnover rate of 50% among home-care workers.”

The study proves that poverty that poverty wages undermine quality of care.

If you want a to stack the odds in favor of a high dignity, caring, nurturing outcome if you need long-term care, you will need to pay caregivers a living wage. The only way, for most middle-to-upper-class Americans to do this is by owning long-term care insurance (LTCi).

Women Do Their Best to Bridge Long-Term Care Chasm

February 1, 2017 by Honey 2 Comments

This past week we saw two articles about the impending long-term care crisis.

The first was in the January 25, 2017 New York Times titled, “Why Women Quit Working: It’s Not for the Reasons Men Do“. In the US, job qualified, many competent women are dropping out of the US workforce to become caregivers. The rates are higher than in any other first world country. “This “care chasm” would seem to explain the stark contrast between working women in the United States and in other advanced industrialized countries with comprehensive family support policies. In most European nations, for example, women’s labor force participation has increased significantly since 2000 instead of faltering.”

I’ve done prior blogs about why our long-term care payment system creates a cycle poverty. These blogs tie in well with the second article.

The second article appeared in the January 28, 2017 Houston Chronicle. It’s titled There’s A Huge imbalance in How Texas Provides for its Old People. This article profiles the unusual, disproportionately Hispanic, low income citizens of Brownsville, TX.

Being a caregiver in Brownsville is a very common job. Brownsville is unique in this regard. If you don’t live in Brownsville, however, you are less likely to find reasonable, high caliber caregivers unless you can afford to pay adequately for your long-term care.

Is long-term care insurance (LTCi) worth it? Does long-term care insurance pay for home care, assisted living, adult day care and nursing homes? Yes. Anyone interested in LTCi rates should contact me. I will be happy to quote long-term care insurance rates at no obligation.

Medicaid’s Woes Highlighted

October 14, 2016 by Honey Leave a Comment

This past month I’ve come across a few articles describing Medicaid’s woes, and highlighting peoples need to plan for funding their own long-term care, now!

This Washington Post story describes why our system is incentivized to discharge patients when they are still very needy, but their Medicare-paid re-hab benefits are exhausted. Medicaid can then often pick up costs, but it pays facilities poorly. This incentivizes facilities to admit the least needful and costly patients. In addition, “The Medicaid system is overly cumbersome and too slow to provide benefits.”

The true heroines of long-term care, paid home care providers, earn an average of $10.11 an hour, states this September New York Times article. About a third of these caregivers rely on food stamps and 28% rely on Medicaid for health insurance. Annual caregiver job turnover rate is 40-60 percent.

The article continues by stating caregivers at Medicaid-funded facilities got their pay raised to minimum wage: $7.15 per hour last year. Such caregivers are often overwhelmed with the sheer number of patients they must care for. “Ms. Walker left her job at a nearby nursing home because “sometimes you had 12 to 15 people to take care of,” she said. “You’re trying to feed everybody, give them baths, but a lot of people got neglected.”

This testimonial about Medicaid’s flaws on the receiving end of care is heart-wrenching, “When Roy Potter was weakened from postpolio syndrome and his wife, Joan, could no longer help him out of bed, a nursing home was “unthinkable,” said Ms. Potter, 83.

For a year, they paid private aides $14 an hour to come to their home in Mount Kisco, N.Y. When they could no longer afford that, Mr. Potter qualified for Medicaid, which pays the preponderance of home care costs in this country.

Over the next two and a half years, more than a dozen agency aides — some caring and competent; some not; some disappearing without explanation — cycled through their home, as did a number of short-term substitutes.

“A new person would come, and I’d have to walk them through everything all over again,” Ms. Potter said.

She grew increasingly anxious about whether an aide would show up. “Every morning I’d hold my breath until the doorbell rang,” she said. “Several times, I had to get in the car and drive to the agency and say, ‘Who is coming today?’”

Last year, when federal overtime provisions took effect, the agency cut back helpers’ hours.

She and her children succeeded in keeping Mr. Potter at home until he died in April, at 86, but finding and keeping help proved a continual battle.

Nursing Home Murders: Connecting the Dots with Medicaid-Paid LTC

May 1, 2014 by Honey Leveen Leave a Comment

With permission from The Center for Long-Term Care Reform, I republish their Monday, April 28, 2014 post about my prior blog.

The reason I chose to cover the horrific nursing home murders still in the headlines here in Houston, is because there is a link between failing to plan responsibly for long-term care well in advance and tragic outcomes, whether or not they’re of the magnitude of the Lexington Place murders.

Many who can afford reasonably priced long-term care insurance simply won’t entertain it. They make excuses to avoid such conversations. It’s an uncomfortable conversation to have.

The horror and negligence that occurred at Lexington Place Nursing Home may be isolated (or maybe not since most of us choose to turn our heads away from this type of event). Even so, the importance of these posts is to understand that such events may be indicative of a widespread trend that’s just beginning.

I’ve chosen to cover these tragic murders because to me, they’re the tip of the iceberg. The industrialized warehousing of the indigent who need care will increase as our national debt grows, Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements continue to drop, and the partisan stalemate in Washington continues. And this financial catastrophe is approaching at an increasingly rapid rate as government programs are deluged with unprepared Baby Boomers who need long-term care but did not plan for it when they were able to afford and obtain reasonably priced long-term care insurance (LTCi). Sadly, events like the Lexington Place murders may become more common.

This blog and the one before it are meant to educate. If these tragic posts help even one person wake up and decide to defer their purchase of a new flatscreen TV or more expensive car in favor of buying a reasonably priced LTCi policy, they’ll be worth it.

LTC E-Alert #14-014: The Nursing Home Murders and LTC News and Comment

Monday, April 28, 2014

Seattle –

LTC Comment: Did you see the news coverage last week about two nursing home residents bludgeoned to death by their roommate in Houston? We opted not to cover it then, but the story does illustrate an important point. Nursing homes, especially those in poorer areas, are heavily dependent on Medicaid which pays them less than the cost of providing the care. Generous Medicare reimbursements help to make up part of the shortfall (at least for now), but the nursing homes most heavily dependent on Medicaid resort to cutting caregiver staff to a minimum and paying extremely low wages in order to operate.

So what? Well, Honey Leveen, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Long-Term Care” and the Center’s Regional Representative in Houston, draws out the ramifications in her recent blog post here. We encourage you to read it and to follow her links to more of the background. Honey points out that the nursing home in which the murders occurred has “nearly all” Medicaid residents. She opines that inadequate revenue led to dysfunctional management which resulted in poor care and finally in this awful crime. She links to an earlier article she wrote for LifeHealthPRO questioning the value of “Partnership” policies that leave people dependent on Medicaid’s mostly nursing-home based care.

This is sad stuff, but information all LTCI producers should consider as they advise clients on long-term care planning.

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Search Results for: caregiver wages

Low Caregiver Wages Create Vicious Cycle

Women Do Their Best to Bridge Long-Term Care Chasm

Medicaid’s Woes Highlighted

Nursing Home Murders: Connecting the Dots with Medicaid-Paid LTC

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