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Harris Proposes Major New Medicare Benefit

Harris and the hosts of 'The View'
Reuters
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey
Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Happy Tuesday! Vice president Kamala Harris continued her media blitz today, following the “60 Minutes” interview that aired Monday night with live appearances on “The View” and “The Howard Stern Show” and a taped guest spot on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Harris criticized former President Donald Trump and made some news, announcing a plan to have Medicare cover in-home care for seniors. She also said she would name a Republican to her Cabinet, citing that as something she would do differently from President Joe Biden.

Trump, meanwhile, gave an interview to conservative podcast host Ben Shapiro in which he lobbed attacks back at Harris and touted his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I got along with him very well, which is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Trump said. Those comments followed new reporting from The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that Trump secretly sent Putin Covid tests for his personal use and has spoken with the Russian leader as many as seven times since leaving office. Trump’s campaign denied that report.

Harris Calls for Medicare to Cover Home Health Care

Vice President Kamala Harris wants Medicare to start covering the cost of long-term, in-home care for elderly Americans.

Appearing on ABC’s “The View” Tuesday morning, Harris outlined her proposal, which is aimed at the millions of American voters who find themselves in the “sandwich generation,” taking care of both older parents and younger children at the same time. Harris said her experience of caring for her mother after she was diagnosed with cancer made her aware of the difficulties facing millions of families.

“There are so many people in our country who are right in the middle,” Harris said. “They're taking care of their kids and they're taking care of their aging parents, and it's just almost impossible to do it all, especially if they work.”

Medicare generally does not cover the cost of full-time, long-term caregivers such as home health aides. Long-term care is provided through private insurance plans, which are expensive and cover only a fraction of the population, or through Medicaid, which is available only to low-income households — a requirement that forces some retirees to spend virtually all of their savings until they qualify. Harris said she wants to remove pressure on families to “feel like they’re going broke in order to qualify for Medicaid assistance.”

While the Harris campaign provided few details about how the program would operate, Harris said funding could come from savings generated by negotiating lower prices for a wider variety of prescription drugs covered by Medicare — a program that started this year under the Inflation Reduction Act. “We are going to save Medicare the money, because we're not going to be paying these high prices,” she said.

A recent analysis from the Brookings Institution noted that a “modest” home care program would cost roughly $40 billion a year, though much depends on how the program is rolled out. According to the Brookings analysis, key questions for the shape and cost of the program include eligibility rules, cost-sharing requirements, standards of care and potential savings from reduced home care spending under Medicaid.

“We can’t define where the lines should be drawn—that’s Congress’s job—but our analysis suggests that there are programmatically tractable, fiscally feasible ways to add a home care benefit to the Medicare program,” the Brookings analysts concluded.

Of course, fiscally feasible does not mean politically practical. Harris’s proposal would likely face stiff resistance from Republicans opposed to expanding Medicare benefits on both fiscal and ideological grounds. As The Washington Post notes, President Joe Biden proposed a massive expansion of home and community care services in Medicaid during the pandemic, when there was significant interest in alternatives to institutional care, but the plan failed to get through Congress.

US Deficit Totals $1.8 Trillion for Fiscal Year 2024: CBO

The federal government’s budget shortfall for fiscal year 2024 grew by $139 billion from the previous year to reach $1.8 trillion, according to an estimate released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office.

Revenues grew by about 11%, or $479 billion, to top $4.9 trillion, fueled by an 11% rise in individual income taxes and a 26% jump in corporate income taxes.

Spending rose by 10%, or $617 billion, with the largest increase coming from the Department of Education, which saw a $308 billion jump — although that was almost entirely the result of the prior year’s accounting for the cancellation of President Joe Biden’s student debt relief program. Excluding that $330 billion decrease in 2023, spending by the Department of Education decreased by $22 billion in 2024.

The next-largest spending increase was for net interest on the public debt, up $240 billion, or 34%, as higher interest rates made government borrowing more expensive. Net interest costs reached $950 billion, more than the Pentagon’s $826 billion budget or the $869 billion spent on Medicare.

The estimated $1.8 trillion deficit for the year is $81 billion lower than CBO projected in June.

The annual total was also affected by calendar-driven shifts in the timing of some payments. If not for those effects, the 2024 deficit would have been 13% larger than in 2023 rather than 8%.

Why it matters: “Deficits of 6.4% of GDP during relative peace and prosperity are nearly unheard of in America,” Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute, wrote on social media. The next president and the next Congress will be faced with critical fiscal decisions as they consider how to deal with the national debt, soaring interest costs and the expiration of 2017 tax cuts.

Send your feedback to yrosenberg@thefiscaltimes.com.

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