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Finding Assistance and Quality Care

Program: Home Health and Hospice: What are Your Options?
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Andrew Schorr:

I was looking on a website and it was saying that maybe there are 16 to 20 million people who are often in this "sandwich generation" who are now the adult child, who get the phone call, someone fell, dad fell and he needs help, and mom isn’t really, either mentally or emotionally equipped to help. They’ve had a life of independence and they still live at that home that they’ve lived in for 50 years. You live far away and you have a demanding job and you have your own kids, and what are you going to do?

So then the question is, where do I get help that provides quality? What benefit is there, does Medicare or Medicaid help pay? What about if I just need somebody to help with the activities of daily living? Is there assistance for that? Well, is there typically assistance, and yet can we be confident that there are ways of connecting with quality care?

Virginia Kenyon:

Yes there are services available. Quality is very personal. What do you mean by quality? There are some parameters out there for Medicare certified home health. There is not such a rating for private duty services. I think people really need to understand that home health Medicare pays for Medicare certified services, which would pay for the services of the situation that I just described, but it only applies to acute, homebound individuals. As soon as mother is up walking around, able to get out of the home again on her own, without assistance, she no longer qualifies for this service, but up to that point Medicare pays 100 percent for the visits and I think people really need to understand the difference visits and hourly care because they are not the same.

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