“Caregiver Shortage Reaches Critical Stage,” by Cassie M. Chew, Provider

“High employment is one reason LT/PAC [Long-Term/Post- Acute Care] centers across the country are having trouble finding people to fill frontline health care roles. After recovering from an economic recession marked by thousands of layoffs, it’s now a buyer’s market for job seekers, especially those with caregiving skills. . . . ‘When we talk about what we can do to enhance their compensation, there are only two answers-one is increasing the minimum wage, and one is provider reimbursement,’ Findley [president of Iowa CareGivers, an advocacy group for nurse assistant] says. ‘We need to ask the question: What are the possibilities? What might work?’ ‘There are great rate variances between payers like Medicaid and other payers like Medicare and private insurance,’ Hennessey says. ‘For providers to survive, it has to be a mix of these payers because in many states, surviving on Medicaid-it doesn’t work.'”

LTC Comment (from Stephen A. Moses, President, Center for Long-Term Care Reform):
The choice is not between raising the minimum wage or increasing Medicaid reimbursements. You can’t do the one without doing the other and raising Medicaid reimbursements hasn’t, won’t and can’t happen due to fiscal constraints. What’s interesting, and depressing, in this long article about the caregiver shortage problem is that no consideration is given to another potential source of revenue for the caregiving profession, i.e. private funding that could come from real asset spend-down absent Medicaid exemptions and loopholes, home equity conversion and private LTC insurance.

Caregiver Shortage Reaches Critical Stage

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