Bipartisan Policy Center Releases Recommendations for LTSS Financing

The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), a Washington think tank founded in 2007 by former Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole and George Mitchell, has issued a major report offering initial recommendations to help address the financing of Long Term Supports and Services (LTSS).

This report proposes “a series of programmatic changes designed to target the needs of individual populations,” informed by feedback from a broad range of stakeholder organizations and experts. The Long-Term Care Initiative recommendations “place a heightened focus on the role of the private market, outline improvements to public programs such as Medicaid, and consider the potential for catastrophic coverage.”

Collectively, the BPC hopes, “these recommendations could form the basis of a bipartisan agreement to address the increasing need for LTSS in the coming decades.”

Recommendations to address the needs of at-risk populations include:

• increasing the availability and affordability of private long-term care insurance;
• creating incentives for states to expand the availability of Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) by: (1) combining existing Medicaid waiver and state plan amendments (SPAs) authorities into a single streamlined SPA; and (2) extending existing enhanced federal matching to encourage states to take advantage of the new streamlined authority;
• allowing states to offer individuals with disabilities whose employment income would result in the loss of Medicaid coverage an LTSS-only “buy-in;” and
• for individuals with significant LTSS needs, pursuing concepts and elements for a public insurance program to: (1) address uninsurable long-term care costs; (2) protect Americans from the catastrophic costs of LTSS; and (3) provide relief to states as they face significant Medicaid costs in the coming years as baby boomers begin to need LTSS.

In late 2016 or early 2017, BPC will release additional recommendations for new approaches to finance LTSS and also to reform LTSS delivery and improve integration of care for persons with multiple chronic conditions and functional limitations.

FMI: The report is available at http://bipartisanpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/BPC-Health-Long-Term-Care.pdf.