Medicare Caregiver Website

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has launched a new site for caregivers. The author recounts her personal experience as a caregiver when she writes:

What do you mean Medicare doesn’t pay for it?

Nothing shocked me more in the early days of caring for my elderly mother than the discovery that Medicare, the U.S.’s universal health coverage for those ages 65 and older, does not pay for so many of the things the frail elderly require.

Not home health aides for those who can’t get out of bed, bathe, dress or feed themselves. Not an assisted-living facility, with handicap-accessible apartments, congregate meals and transportation services. Not nursing homes where the most helpless of the elderly live out their days with round-the-clock supervision.

But with the launch of the new cargiver’s website, it will be easier to figure out what Medicare does cover and what it doesn’t; to find community-based resources to take up the slack; to access other government and non-profit agencies that assist the elderly and their caregivers (most often adult children); and to find the message boards, online forums and blogs that have proliferated along with the exploding needs of these two generations.

Kerry Weems, the acting administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the driving force behind its new one-stop-shopping Web page, acknowledges that all but the poorest Americans are on their own when it comes to paying for long-term care.

So he is troubled by widespread misunderstanding about this, by polls showing the majority of Americans believe that Medicare will, indeed, pay for what is known as custodial care. “We should be shouting from the rooftops, as often as we can, that Medicare does not have a long-term care benefit,” Mr. Weems said.

That is clearer than ever before on the new Web page, “Ask Medicare,” (at www.medicare.gov/caregivers/) which aggregates many useful resources previously difficult to find or incoherently presented on the sprawling Web site of federal Department of Health and Human Services. “Ask Medicare” serves as a gateway to rich stores of information and support from both government and non-government sources, including AARP, the Administration on Aging, the Alzheimer’s Association, the National Alliance for Caregiving, and even Johnson & Johnson. All have Web sites of their own that include informational essays by experts, interactive tools and various networking opportunities for caregivers who so often find themselves terribly isolated.

Another similar site is Johnson & Johnson’s Web site for caregivers, called Strength for Caring (www.strengthforcaring.com/).

-From: “Medicare Reaches Out to Caregivers”, by Jane Gross, The New York Times, September 18, 2008 at http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/medicare-reaches-out-to-caregivers/?pagemode=print retrieved 9/22/08. Thanks to Barbara Moscowitz, LICSW, Director, Senior HealthWISE, for forwarding.

9/08