Remembering What’s Important During the Holidays: Being Home with Loved Ones

Happy Holidays from the Partnership! As we enjoy the holiday season with our friends and family, it’s a reminder of how important it is to be home with our loved ones – especially for our seniors. The holidays are a time of the year when so many people return home, and if the Choose Home Care Act is passed, that could be a reality for so many more Medicare beneficiaries next year.

If enacted, the Choose Home Care Act would increase access to post-acute care—such as skilled nursing, physical therapy, primary care, personal care, transportation, meals, home adaptations, and continuous remote patient monitoring—at home by enabling eligible Medicare patients to receive extended care services as an add-on to the existing Medicare Home Health benefit for 30 days following discharge from a hospital.

This modernization of the Medicare program will allow beneficiaries an additional high-quality care option to recover in the comfort of their own home rather than in a nursing home, increasing patient and family satisfaction as well as reducing the risk of exposure to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

The numbers show that Choose Home is overwhelmingly popular – nine in ten adults say it is important to them to have the ability to select the setting they prefer to recover post-hospitalization. Plus, it could save as much as $247 million annually for Medicare, meaning a lesser burden for taxpayers and the Medicare Trust Fund.

This holiday season, we hope you’ll encourage your lawmakers to Choose Home, so every senior has the option to recover at home with their loved ones.