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5/10/2010 9:51 AM 

By now you most probably have read about the CLASS Act, the portion of healthcare reform devoted to supporting long-term care. Although CLASS is an acronym for “Community Living Assistance Services and Supports,” it really is a “class act” — for the first time, the federal government is offering social insurance support for long-term care, as opposed to a Medicaid entitlement (and limited Medicare for shorter stays). “Social insurance,” like Social Security and Medicare, involves people paying their own way for years rather than receiving a government handout. Classy, yes, but unfortunately just a little bit late in the game for you.

By “you” I mean the family member searching for support for a frail elderly loved one—the typical visitor, I would imagine, to SnapforSeniors.com. The bad news is that the post-65 age group is highly unlikely to ever qualify for CLASS Act support. For that matter, family members in the under-65 age group may have to wait a while. CLASS will draw its financing from voluntary premium deductions from employee payrolls, and the deductions are not likely to start for another two or three years. Those contributions will have to continue for five years for every employee before they qualify. It could well be another seven or eight years before anyone sees any benefits from this.

Moreover, no one really knows what the exact premiums or benefits will be. A $120 a month premium has been a guesstimate that’s been thrown about, and the benefit by law can’t be less than $50 a month. But because the program will be voluntary (at least negatively, in that employees must opt out of the program to avoid premium deductions), the size and health status of the paying cohort is unknown, leaving the numbers more than a little fuzzy.

My guess is most employees will stay with the program as they become more educated about long-term care’s realities—for example, the likelihood that most will need some form of long-term care sometime, and that it could well be extremely expensive (as discussed in previous blogs). Don’t forget, too, that growing numbers of employees are gaining a real-world education about long-term care from their parents’ experiences with it. Some may even recognize the possibility of their needing long-term care themselves at almost any time, depending on urgent or emergency needs. All of these individuals will, I think, welcome CLASS as at least a partial help.

But for today’s elderly, sorry about that. It’s a sad commentary on how we, as a society, have neglected and denied the realities of aging and its needs over years and decades. Our current broken financing system grows out of the resulting political failure. CLASS was at least a step toward a more realistic and manageable system. To be sure, contributions from private insurance and personal assets will always be needed to help cover such broad-ranging expenses; of that there can be no doubt. But we can do better than require people to sacrifice their life savings and nearly all their assets, or have their loved ones dip into savings and children’s college funds, to sustain them in old age. And it’s too bad that the solution we do have is such a slow-mover.

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Location: Blogs Caregiving by Richard Peck

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