Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 7, 1995 TAG: 9510090035
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: C-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post|
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
``Congress's rash, regressive move reflects cruel disregard for America's growing number of citizens who are elderly and have disabilities,'' said Elma Holder, executive director of the National Citizens' Coalition for Nursing Home Reform. About 1.6 million elderly are in long-term care paid for by Medicaid, at a cost of about $30 billion a year.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who presided at the Democratic-sponsored hearing on GOP plans to cut $182 billion from Medicaid growth over seven years, also said that the House version of the GOP plan wipes out an existing ``spousal protection'' law ensuring that the at-home spouses of nursing home patients need not give up their income and assets before Medicaid starts paying the bills for the spouse in the nursing home.
Medicaid law once led to the ``pauperization of the families of those who need nursing home care,'' because Medicaid payment for nursing home care did not kick in until the family had spent almost all it had providing care for the patient, Kennedy said.
But a 1988 law required states ``to allow a spouse in the community to retain a minimum income of $1,200 a month'' from combined family income without the nursing home partner's losing Medicaid nursing home eligibility. That would be repealed in the House bill, Kennedy said, as well as a 1965 provision forbidding states from forcing the adult children of the elderly to pay their parents' nursing home bills.
However, Mike Collins, a Republican spokesman for the House Commerce Committee, which handled the House bill, said Democratic claims that Medicaid long-term care patients and their families will go unprotected are wrong. He said the GOP bill directs the states to draft their own laws on nursing home quality standards and spousal protection, and lays out a detailed list of conditions and situations they must address.
``What we're doing is ending an eight-year experiment with federalization of nursing home standards, ... an experiment that everyone including President Clinton himself as governor criticized as a total failure and a bureaucratic nightmare - confining, expensive and counterproductive.''
But Holder said the standards to be repealed by the GOP bill include the right to be ``free from physical restraints and misuse of drugs'' to quiet patients, ``the right to voice grievances without retribution,'' assessments of individual patients' needs and a wide range of other requirements. She said the 1987 federal law had been passed expressly because states had not protected nursing home residents.
In a related development, 22 GOP governors, in a letter to Clinton released Friday, said they found his recent remarks ``concerning how governors and state legislatures would act with regard to spousal impoverishment protections to be alarming. ... Your assumption that states would throw people out of their homes is out of character for presidential discussions.''
They added that his comments were particularly ill-directed in view of the fact that in 1994, 36 states had spousal protections that exceeded the federal minimum and 12 were at the federal ceiling (about $18,000).
On the Medicare front Friday, House Republicans moved to counter Democratic charges that the GOP is raiding Medicare to pay for tax cuts. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer, R-Texas, and Commerce Committee Chairman Thomas Bliley Jr., R-Richmond, announced they would back an amendment to ensure that ``none of the $270 billion in Medicare savings would be diverted for tax cuts,'' but would go solely toward strengthening the financial condition of the Medicare system. They gave no further details. The amendment will be sponsored by Reps. Phil English, R-Pa., and Ed Whitfield, R-Ky.
The Senate Finance Committee last week added an amendment specifically directing that $71 billion in higher premiums and deductibles on seniors be earmarked for the financially troubled Medicare hospital fund.
by CNB