Exclusive | Harris’ plan for in-home elder care will cost tens of billions more than projected: economists

Vice President Kamala Harris’ new plan for Medicare to cover the costs of in-home care for seniors will cost tens of billions of dollars more than her campaign projects, economists and experts told The Post.

Harris, 59, announced her plan during her media blitz on Tuesday, saying: “It’s just about helping an aging parent or person — you know — prepare a meal, put their sweater on” while relieving Americans of the cost of transferring loved ones to a residential care facility.

The “Medicare at Home” initiative would pay for health aides to assist seniors who “are unable to independently perform activities of daily living like bathing, eating, and going to the bathroom and/or face serious cognitive impairment,” according to a Harris campaign press release.

While the Harris team cites a Brookings Institution white paper that estimates the program cost at $40 billion, the proposal’s details are scant about how it “will be fully paid for” by negotiating lower prescription drug prices, cracking down on pharmaceutical benefit managers, “addressing Medicare fraud” and implementing “international tax reform.”

The Democratic presidential nominee is also promising the benefit will extend to “all of our nation’s seniors and those with disabilities on Medicare,” which currently serves at least 67 million Americans.

But Mark Warshawsky, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) focused on long-term care issues, told the Post the plan “will be very expensive for the taxpayer” and a “much larger” price tag than the Democratic campaign is estimating to expand in-home care, which currently costs $130 billion nationwide.

“My view [of the plan] is largely negative because these costs are currently covered by a range of both private and public spending already,” Warshawsky said. “And then for those that can’t, Medicaid covers these expenses.”

“There are a lot of loopholes that enable people who have significant assets to become eligible for coverage through Medicaid — the value of their home is often excluded, their 401k assets depending on the state are often excluded,” he went on. “Medicaid pretty much covers almost half of long term care costs in the country already.”

“If anything, we need to be reining in some of these Medicaid costs on long-term care because we have a gigantic deficit and we have a gigantic government debt,” Warshawsky added.

“It is difficult to overstate the irresponsibility, corruption, and insanity of this proposal,” wrote libertarian Cato Institute health policy studies director Michael Cannon in a Tuesday blog post.

“With one hand [Harris] proposes to increase Medicare long-term-care spending by $40 billion,” Cannon explained: “With the other hand, she proposes to cut $40 billion of Medicare drug spending—all without denying benefits to anyone.”

The Cato scholar went further and accused Harris of engaging in “a corrupt attempt to buy the votes of Medicare enrollees and their middle-aged children in an election year.”

Warshawsky also said the expanded benefit would rely “largely” on immigrants as in-home health aides — likely forcing the government “to increase immigration to accommodate that expansion in that demand.”

“That $40 billion estimate — that’s very disingenuous because that $40 billion estimate comes from Brookings and they have a very limited program, a very tightly defined program in terms of who’s eligible,” Warshawsky concluded. “It definitely will increase.”

The AEI fellow also said it was “very misleading” for the campaign to claim the government would “save money by providing home care as opposed to nursing home care.”

Even when considering “a sliding scale” suggested by the Harris campaign to provide more coverage “for those of modest incomes” and “cost-sharing for seniors with higher incomes,” an AARP report found family members of seniors with health needs were providing an additional $600 billion in unpaid care as of 2021.

That’s before considering the mounting costs of hearing aids, as well as eye and ear exams.

The Harris campaign cited a University of Michigan medical study that claimed the high price tag “could potentially be offset by reduction in falls, depression and cognitive decline — the kinds of health problems and injuries that can result from uncorrected vision.”

President Biden tried to tuck a $400 billion expansion of in-home care coverage into his American Jobs Plan, but was unable to get it through Congress, the Washington Post reported in 2021.

The Harris plan will likely increase federal spending and broaden entitlements when Americans are already suffering from higher prices, said the experts, with Cannon pointing to a Congressional Budget Office projection that the federal budget deficit reached $1.9 trillion as of Sept 1.

Richard Stern, the director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, warned that the plan “will increase federal spending and that will create more inflationary pressures at a time when American families are seeing prices having already jumped over 20% since Biden took office.”

“We already have massive budget deficits, and with an anticipated 70% of seniors likely to need home care at some point, policies should be focusing on reducing barriers to entry for home health workers and and helping seniors save more for retirement by cutting taxes,” said Nicholas Johns, the Senior Policy and Government Affairs Manager for National Taxpayers Union.

“Vice President Harris’s proposal for expanding Medicare will only exacerbate America’s entitlement spending problem. Entitlements are the biggest element of the federal budget and the biggest driver of America’s metastasizing public debt — a problem that many Americans are deeply worried about. Harris should be looking for ways to streamline Medicare and all our entitlement programs — not making them bigger,” said Samuel Gregg, political economist at the American Institute for Economic Research.

“This is a classic case of a politician using entitlements to try and attract votes. It’s thus irresponsible as public policy.”

The proposal comes after Harris has backed off her previous support for Medicare for All and eliminating private health insurance.

Her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.