“Anne Tumlinson, CEO, ATI Advisory”

“Anne Tumlinson, CEO, ATI Advisory,”Aging Media

Quote:  “If there was one thing I could change, either everybody would just have private insurance for this, or we would be in some kind of a social insurance model [to cover that] huge gap. That’s important, but it’s not enough. We also have to have this infra-structure because even [having] the money to pay for services is not enough, if you’re having to set up and manage basically a mini health and aging services system in your home all by yourself. We’re not going to be using those dollars very intelligently if we don’t have a community-based infrastructure to support getting people connected to what they need when they need it.”

LTC Comment, Stephen A. Moses, President, Center for Long-Term Care Reform:

Anne Tumlinson seems to be on every panel and commission addressing long-term care. She’s full of ideas about what’s wrong and what would be better. What she lacks is any explanation of why long-term care services and financing are such a mess already. Consequently her proposed solution depends on magically attracting enough money to create a lot of centrally planned aging “infrastructure.” That is exactly the kind of top down, government driven approach that ruined long-term care. In a free market people take personal responsibility to avoid risk and cost, buy what they want with their own or their insurance carriers’ dollars, and produce an integrated system of services based on what consumers actually need and want. We can get there but only by eschewing wishful thinking, depending less on public programs, and returning responsibility to consumers. How? Read Medicaid and Long-Term Care.