Your Sept. 25 editorial noting that long-term care reform was the key to solving our Medicaid budget troubles was absolutely right on the mark. Though the elderly and disabled make up about one-quarter of the Medicaid population, they account for 59 percent of the Medicaid budget, with the bulk of expenditures for them going to long-term care services.
Pressure on the long-term care budget will only increase. Our country faces a rapidly growing population needing long-term care services, a population that is disproportionately poor.
The answer is not to turn Medicaid into a block-grant program, imposing a unilateral cut, and shoving responsibility for those left without services onto the states. The answer is fundamental long-term care reform.
Along with Sen. Paul Simon (D-Illinois), I introduced a comprehensive long-term care reform measure that would be an important first step in helping states deal with this growing problem.
It is based on the bipartisan reforms we made in Wisconsin during the 1980s, where we established consumer-oriented and consumer-directed home- and community-based services that allow those needing long-term care to remain in their own homes and communities.
Those reforms helped bring Wisconsin’s Medicaid budget under control and saved taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Between 1980 and 1993, while Medicaid nursing home use increased 47 percent nationally, in Wisconsin Medicaid nursing home use actually dropped 15 percent.
This is the kind of national long-term care reform that is needed to tame the Medicaid budget.
