Listen: Home health care is facing devastating ‘clawbacks’

Terry Wilcox’s grandmother lived in an isolated house at the top of a hill overlooking the magical mountains and valleys of the Ozarks until, as she tells it, “the day we literally had to drag her off of it.” Wilcox, like many others in her generation, has been in the tricky position of having to take care of aging parents and in-laws in addition to her young twins.

Home health care services have helped keep Wilcox’s family healthy and safe — and reduce her stress — but they aren’t equally accessible to everybody. And that uneven ground is now being further threatened by Medicare’s proposal for deep cuts and clawbacks to payments made during the pandemic for home health care.

“When you think about what home health care can help with, for keeping seniors safe and families being able to work, it’s pretty significant,” Wilcox said. “So I’m a big proponent of expanding home health care and making it more of a priority, not less of one.”

This conversation emerged from Wilcox’s First Opinion essay, “Medicare’s cuts to home health are a step in the wrong direction.” Wilcox is a co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Patients Rising.

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