Cargill: Help seniors remain healthy and independent with home health payment innovation

Like much of the rest of the United States, Michigan is getting older. Nearly a quarter of the state’s residents are older than 60, and by 2025 it’s estimated that Michigan’s seniors will outnumber children.

Here and nationwide, the aging population has created more than a few public policy conundrums – particularly when it comes to healthcare. One of the most pressing concerns for healthcare advocates is how to help seniors remain healthy and independent at home, where they prefer to be. And even though home healthcare exists here – allowing more than 130,000 seniors to “age in place” thanks to nearly 40,000 skilled professionals – it takes the dedicated commitment of lawmakers to protect it.

Recently, we’ve had good reason to thank Sen. Debbie Stabenow for her dedication to safeguarding this care for our aging friends, loved ones and neighbors.

Last year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in Washington, D.C. created a complicated, new policy that changes how providers of skilled home healthcare are paid. It was developed with good intentions: to stop fraud and abuse and the loss of precious healthcare dollars. Called the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM), the regulations would allow Medicare to make “behavioral adjustments” to provider payments based on assumptions about what caregivers might do instead of evidence of how they actually care for Medicare patients.

Click here to see the full article on the Lansing State Journal article.