Home Health & Hospice Week

If home care wants to gain law- and policymaker support, the industry must show why it's the smart economical choice.

That was the message of President Bill Clinton at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice's 2008 annual meeting. The trade group's 27th annual conference, which took place in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. earlier this month, drew about 4,000 attendees including 256 exhibitors, says NAHC's Jennifer Littlepage.

Attendees packed the large auditorium where the 42nd president of the United States addressed the conference on Mon. Oct. 13. NAHC President Val Halamandaris, who has known Clinton since his 20s, introduced the former president as having "enormous respect for the people who work in home care and hospice."

Clinton spoke mainly about the nation's financial crisis, including causes of and solutions for the predicament. His proposal to freeze foreclosures and renegotiate mortgage terms to keep people in their homes got a round of applause from the capacity crowd.

Money wasted: Clinton also touched on health care, noting that the U.S. spends more than any other country on administrative costs for health insurance -- 30 percent. "That won't surprise most of you," he told the crowd.

"We cannot afford to add to administrative costs," Clinton stressed. "We should be reducing it." That's why using managed care plans for health care insurance like Medicare is a mistake, he argued.

Home care has an important role to play to keep health care costs down, Clinton noted. The current reimbursement system is geared toward acute care episodes and encourages excessive hospitalizations.

Home health agencies work to keep patients out of hospitals, reducing costly institutional stays. Excessive hospital stays costs the U.S. $300 billion, even though lengths of stay are shorter here than in other countries, he said.

"What you do is going to be more important, not less," he told the home care audience.

"That's your great opportunity," Clinton urged. You must prove to lawmakers that home care is the right financial choice and argue for changes that encourage home care utilization, he said.

Attendees told Eli they enjoyed the pres-ident's speech, but had hoped he would speak more on home care specifically.

A senior panel addressing subsidized senior housing preceded the president's speech. Four seniors in their 70s and 80s who live in senior housing urged more funding for such housing and for home care to keep them in their homes.

There is a miles-long wait for seniors to get into such housing. And once they are there, "we're hungry for some kind of delivery system to keep them in place," Steve Protulis from Florida Hous-ing For The Elderly said of seniors currently living in housing. The "biggest tragedy" is residents begging to stay in their housing and not have to go to institutions such as nursing homes, Protulis said.