Insurers have not rushed all that many new benefits that resemble long-term
care (LTC) benefits into their 2019 Medicare Advantage plans — but they
have added some.
Analysts from Avalere Health, a health care consulting firm, have come up
with some Medicare Advantage mini LTC benefits offering counts. The
analysts put the counts in a new Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits
update.
What’s new here?
Traditionally, Medicaid has covered nursing home care. Medicare has covered
home medical care, but it has not covered non-medical home care — such as help
with dressing, or meal delivery services — that might help people cope
with the lack of ability to handle the “activities of daily living.”
Last spring, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) freed insurers
to add some “homemaker services” to their benefits packages, by
telling insurers that it would let them add benefits addressing the “social
determinants of care” and the needs of people with chronic conditions to their
Medicare Advantage plan benefits packages.
What new benefits will now be
available through Medicare Advantage plans?
The gestation of a human baby usually takes 40 weeks. Adding new benefits
to health plans often takes much longer.
But Avalere analysts found, after combing through huge benefits package
data files from CMS, that many Medicare Advantage plans will offer at least one
of the benefits made possible by the new CMS rules in 2019.
The most popular of the top five new supplemental benefits is a
wellness benefit, not a short-term care version of an LTC benefit: 1,653 of the
plans the Avalere analysts reviewed will offer nicotine replacement
therapy in 2019.
For data on the four most common mini-LTC-type benefits, see the data cards
in the slideshow above. (Hover your cursor pointer over the slideshow box to
see the arrows that steer the slides back and forth.)
Note that, even when a benefit is of the type that might be offered by a
long-term care insurance (LTCI), or short-term care insurance (STCI), policy,
the amounts of the services covered by a 2019 Medicare Advantage plan may be
much smaller than what an LTCI or STCI policy would cover. Some Anthem
plans, for example, will cover meal delivery for some patients, but only for a
period of up to 42 days.
Allison Bell, ThinkAdvisor's insurance
editor, previously was LifeHealthPro's health insurance editor. She has a
bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a
master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at
Northwestern University. She can be reached at abell@alm.com or on Twitter at
@Think_Allison.
No comments:
Post a Comment