In this episode, Merrily Orsini speaks to Jason Bring, a healthcare partner at Arnall Golden Gregory, who co-chairs the law firm’s National Post-Acute Care team and serves on the board of the National Association of Home Care and Hospice. Bring also works with the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization on legislative issues in the industry.
Through both his position at Arnall Golden Gregory and his personal involvement in the home healthcare field, Bring offers a lot of information about the role legislation plays in home healthcare from top to bottom.
Topics discussed include:
- How Bring’s work affects home healthcare providers and consumers
- Current legislative issues that impact the home healthcare field
- How legislation could potentially drive significant progress in home healthcare
Conversation Highlights:
From a legislative perspective, some of the topics Bring explores surround changes that can come with the new administration. For example, the Choose Home legislation is expected to be introduced soon, and it creates a new payment model for home health built around grouping home health and personal care services together to make it easier for patients to stay at home, where they can receive care for a lower cost.
He explains that people want home- and community-based services, which are beneficial because they not only lower costs, but they often yield more favorable outcomes in the care experience.
In the past, around the 1980s and 1990s, adult children were a particularly mobile generation who often moved far away from their parents. This led to an increase in care facilities, such as nursing homes, because adult children were not present to oversee care themselves or to hire an in-home caregiver. However, as technology progressed to include video chatting and telehealth, people are more likely to prefer in-home care and can get the support they need to arrange it.
Legislation is generally supporting that movement toward home health services. There is a current piece of legislation called the Better Care Better Jobs Act that seeks to specifically help home health services by increasing financial accessibility through Medicaid, expanding the workforce by bringing more funding to workers and providing more opportunity for advancement in the field.
Furthermore, since home care costs less in terms of expenditures, these types of legislation are a win for the government, providers and the people being cared for.
In particular, providers will be able to use the financial resources from this type of legislation to help make progress in the field overall. Bring’s job is to bring that provider perspective to the table of the positions he holds in the field and ensure providers get paid the money they deserve.
Lastly, Bring explains there is legislation on the radar of congress now that could be beneficial to the home healthcare field by allocating over $400 billion to home care. The proposal may resurface soon, and Bring encourages people to be on the lookout for it.
Listen to this episode here, or on Apple Podcasts, Google, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.
To learn more about how legislation and policy can affect home healthcare from the top down, listen to Merrily Orsini’s interview with David Totaro, chief of government affairs for BAYADA Home Health Care, where he explains the policy decisions that impact home care.
If this episode has been helpful, be sure to leave a five-star review and share the podcast with your friends to help in the national effort to educate about home healthcare options. Connect with Merrily Orsini on Twitter: @MerrilyO.
Sponsors
The Help Choose Home podcast series is a collaborative effort by Axxess, the National Association for Home Care and Hospice and corecubed to educate the public about the many benefits of the in-home care industry, which includes non-medical home care, private duty nursing care, medical home health, hospice and other in-home health and wellness services.
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