In 2018, long-term care advocates got New Hampshire legislators to overwhelmingly vote against putting Medicaid long-term care in the hands of out-of-state Big Insurers. But now Big Insurers are trying again.
According to the federal Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, the all-payer margin for freestanding nursing homes averaged only .4% nationally in 2023, with almost half of nursing homes in the red. Medicaid isn't paying costs like a 36% increase in wages for non-supervisory employees since February 2020, or inflation-driven costs for food and supplies.
There is no room within negative margins for Big Insurers to siphon off funds as middlemen.
And Big Insurers are in the business of delaying and denying lifesaving care. As one article reported, "The nation’s largest health insurance company pressured its medical staff to cut off payments for seriously ill patients in lockstep with a computer algorithm’s calculations, denying rehabilitation care for older and disabled Americans as profits soared, a STAT investigation has found." To illustrate this cruelty, as another article reported: "Robby Martin got an unsettling call from his father, Jackie. The 82-year-old told his son that a representative of the insurance giant UnitedHealth Group had barged into his nursing home room at 2.30 in the morning, announcing that he was going to be checked out at the end of the week." Jackie Martin died alone in his bathroom at home, just 5 days after his life-preserving nursing home coverage was cancelled.
Is that the sort of cruel profiteering we want for the most vulnerable Granite Staters?
TELL YOUR LEGISLATORS TO PUT SENIORS, NOT BIG INSURERS, FIRST!