In what may be the most damning sign of fundamental cynicism, Kamala Harris last week proposed a new Medicare home-health-care entitlement to be “paid for” with . . . fairy dust, basically.
Notably, she announced it on “The View,” where she could be sure no one would (could) ask any probing questions.
The benefit would surely be popular: As America ages, ever more of us need help managing at home, rather than going into some kind of supported-living institution.
But the cost would be huge.
As Chris Pope noted in The Post, it could easily reach half a trillion dollars a year.
Harris suggests a price-tag of “just” $40 billion a year, but that’s derived from a Brookings Institution plan that’s designed around a means-tested Medicaid program.
Whereas an Urban Institute plan that better matches Harris’ words would run $400 billion a year, even with a daily limit of $150 a day in services to a beneficiary.
Meanwhile, Harris says she’d pay for it with more Medicare drug-price controls, modeled on those she helped pass in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
Yet those controls backfired: They capped seniors’ out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 a year under Part D — but insurers still had to make ends meet, so they hiked premiums 20% the first year after the new rules passed, and were looking at another 50% increase this year.
That’s when Team Biden intervened by announcing a “demonstration project” that just happens to involve roughly $5 billion in subsidies to insurers to keep Part D premiums down — for now.
Reality check: Medicare is already headed to bankruptcy within a few years, as its spending vastly outpaces what it takes in from payroll taxes; its trust funds will be empty by 2036.
Washington isn’t facing that pending disaster; the last thing the country needs is a new benefit that will bring the crisis far closer.
A Democratic Congress in 2021 rejected President Biden’s call to spend a mere $15 billion for a new home-care program; a President Harris has no hope of passing her much-larger proposal.
Which makes the candidate’s announcement nothing but a cynical gesture to exploit a genuine problem — to win votes by raising false hopes with a “plan” that can’t work and has no chance of becoming a reality.
Harris’ “politics of joy” sure is sleazy.
