By Keith Myers - Guest blogger
President and CEO of LHC Group, a provider of home care, rehabilitation and hospice services
Effective healthcare improves a patient's quality of life and offers the maximum amount of independence possible. Every healthcare provider has a role to play here: the doctor, the surgeon, the hospital, the skilled nursing facility and the home care provider. And in these stressful economic times, all parts of the healthcare system have to be focused on quality and patient satisfaction.
That's why it's so troubling to see vital home healthcare and hospice services be neglected in the overall healthcare reform debate taking place in Washington. We all want to see everyone in America get coverage, and every part of the healthcare system has to do its part to lower its costs and help pay for increased coverage. But home health reimbursements should not take a larger share of the burden than other sectors.
Nine out of every 10 patients prefer to receive care in the home. This kind of care can be everything from acute care following a hospital stay or serious illness; long-term care for someone with a disability or an elderly person in declining health; hourly shift care for a medically fragile infant on a ventilator; or end-of-life care for a terminally ill patient.
As a CEO of a home care company that partners with nonprofit hospitals to help with their home health operations, I am of course always sensitive to the bottom line. But the fact is that Medicare is actually spending less today per home health beneficiary and on home health services overall than it did in 1996, and growth in home health spending is less than half that of overall Medicare spending.
If Medicare beneficiaries lose access to home services, other larger institutions may be affected. Hospitals, already facing tight Medicare reimbursements, could see more patients who ought to be in a home setting. So could institutional skilled nursing facilities.
Instead, Congress should consider how cost-efficient home health services are. Preventive home healthcare saves Medicare and Medicaid billions of dollars a year, on a wide variety of advanced and sometimes technologically complicated services including, among others, the use of ventilators or intravenous antibiotic therapy.
We should also consider the potential economic impact from massive cuts in Medicare home healthcare. Right now, home care is providing thousands of new jobs. From 1993 to 2007, home care employment grew an average of 5.4 percent annually. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that many of the most needed jobs now and in the future will be in home care (including the top two: personal care aides and home health aides).
The facts and figures are of course important, but I never forget the gift of compassion that healthcare can provide. Home care provides patients that gift at a time when their world feels as if it has been turned upside down. We need to preserve that gift.
Keith Myers is the co-founder, president and CEO of LHC Group, a Lafayette, LA-based provider of home care, rehabilitation and hospice services
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