Senior care, already challenged by pandemic and Boomers aging, needs Medicaid
PACE, the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, centers provide government-funded medical care and social services to people older than 55, and they are a growing alternative to nursing home care. In the photo, physical therapist Brad Ellis, standing, works with George Raines on mobility issues at a PACE center in Tennessee. (Anna Claire Vollers/Stateline)
Caring for Oregon's seniors has been my life's work. It began when I was a high school student in Hillsboro, and it continues today in my role leading Arete Living, an Oregon-based company that provides assisted living and memory care facilities.
Our caregivers and staff provide essential care to hundreds of seniors and people with disabilities every day in all corners of the state. We meet people where they are, and we provide the care they need to sustain their independence and quality of life. The work is hard, but it is also incredibly rewarding and fulfilling.
The last five years in senior care have been challenging to say the least. We faced a global pandemic and worked tirelessly to keep our residents safe and supported. And yet, with the pandemic behind us, I can say that I have never been more worried about the future of long term care in Oregon.
At the federal level, discussions around cutting Medicaid are rampant and incredibly worrisome. At the state level, difficult decisions are being made about what programs to fund and what programs to cut.
I am deeply concerned about what cuts to healthcare, or flat investments, will mean for our seniors as more Baby Boomers age into the years of their life when they need care, whether it is in an assisted living facility or in their own home. The increasing number of aging Oregonians who have more complex care needs than past generations, along with record-high inflation in medical supplies, food services, labor, and other critical health care components, means that the cost to provide care in Oregon is higher than it has ever been.
These issues are felt more deeply in our rural and frontier communities where fewer caregivers are available and health care deserts already exist. Older Oregonians who have spent their lives in these communities should not have to move away from family and friends simply to find care. But Oregon is seeing assisted living and memory care facilities close their doors amid the combined pressures of more regulation, higher costs, and an underfunded Medicaid system.
I know that lawmakers have hard choices to make, and I do not envy their positions. But I urge them to think about the seniors in their districts who have worked hard and contributed to Oregon's beauty and success.
They deserve a long term care system that is well-funded and thriving. That will only happen when lawmakers step up and invest in Medicaid for our most vulnerable seniors, the same individuals we serve every day at Arete facilities and in others around the state. They are counting on us.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Elon Musk's business empire was built on government help. How badly could Donald Trump hurt him?
Even for Elon Musk, this is — to use the precise technical term — bonkers. Barely one week after leaving the Trump administration with every semblance of amity, the world's richest person is going scorched earth against the leader of the world's richest nation. Insults and threats. Calls for impeachment. Sinister references to Jeffrey Epstein. Somehow, Kanye West is also involved. It's like the messiest online influencer drama you've ever seen, except the parties are two of the most powerful people on Earth. But when it comes down to brass tacks, what exactly does Musk stand to lose in this titanic celebrity divorce? If Trump were to follow through on all his threats, and use every available weapon against Musk's business empire, how badly could it hurt him? The short answer is: pretty badly. In fact, with some admittedly quick and dirty math, we can put a price tag on some of it. Elon Musk's estimated $388bn fortune — already $26.6bn smaller than it was before this frank exchange of thermonuclear warheads — depends on the success of two companies which are both intertwined with the U.S. political system. One is Tesla, which makes electric vehicles; the other is SpaceX, which builds rockets, spacecraft, and satellites. X, formerly Twitter, can be left aside for now; having bought the social network 2022 for $44bn, Musk is still struggling to recoup his investment and has almost certainly lost money overall. Let's start with Space Exploration Technologies Corp., aka SpaceX. Not many people can afford to rent a rocket, so a lot of its business comes from government contracts, and U.S. government contracts most of all. As of writing, according to federal data, the Texas-based company has been paid or promised just under $21bn by Uncle Sam since 2008. The total potential value of all SpaceX's existing contracts, however, is much higher: $89.2bn. If Trump cancelled every contract tomorrow, that would mean a theoretical maximum of $68bn in lost potential income. For context, that's more than four times SpaceX's entire forecasted revenue for 2025, and nearly 15 times its revenue from 2022. Of course, there's no way to know if those maximum payments would ever actually have been made. So we could also get a rough sense of what SpaceX stands to lose by looking at the actual cash it received from federal coffers every year. In 2022 that was $2.8bn; in 2023, $3.1bn; and in 2024, $3.8bn. On the plus side for Musk, the U.S. government is so dependent on SpaceX that some critics have called it a monopoly in the making. SpaceX ferries our astronauts to and from the International Space Station, is heavily involved in Nasa's moon landing program, and manages an increasing share of government satellite communications as well. Still, that does not guarantee safety. Would you really, in all soberness, bet against Donald Trump doing something that hurts the country merely to punish his personal enemies? In fact, as Talking Points Memo editor-in-chief Josh Marshall argues, SpaceX's critical role might actually put it in greater danger, because it leaves the feds with few options except "expropriation or nationalization". Like SpaceX, Tesla has benefited greatly from taxpayer money, mostly in the form of emission trading payments from non-electric carmakers and tax credits or consumers buying electric vehicles. An analysis by The Washington Post put Tesla's total income from emission credits since 2007 at $11.4bn as of this February. Its gain from tax credits, which allow more people to buy its cars at higher prices, has been estimated at $3.4bn. Those emission credit schemes are run by U.S. states, not by the federal government. Nevertheless, Trump and the Republican Party have tried to undermine such schemes by contesting states' ability to set their own emissions rules. The wider impact is difficult to calculate. In contrast to SpaceX, Tesla sells to ordinary people, who tend to have their own opinions independent of government. In reputational terms, splitting noisily with Trump could reverse some of its recent sales losses; on the other hand, it might just make Tesla hated on both sides of politics. The biggest risk may be regulatory. At the time of Trump's second inauguration, Tesla was being investigated by numerous federal agencies including the Justice Department, the National Labor Relations Board, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — which by itself had six pending probes. During his time at DOGE, Democrats feared Musk could use his power to influence or cancel these cases. But Trump's unabashed willingness to wield state power to punish those who displease him while rewarding loyalists cuts both ways. Live by the chainsaw, die by the chainsaw. How much that costs Tesla would depend on how far Trump is willing to go, and on the outcome of any ensuing court battle. But when U.S. stock exchanges closed on Thursday its share price had crashed by nearly 12 percent, wiping $122bn off its market value. So far we've only addressed Elon Musk's finances. Yet there are other, more personal ways that Trump could hurt him if the former reality TV star truly isn't here to make friends. For example, Trump's old advisor Stephen Bannon — who has previously branded Musk a "parasitic illegal immigrant" — urged the administration to investigate Musk's immigration history, and potentially deport him. Unlike some of the feverish allegations that emanate from the extended Trump-o-sphere, this one actually has some substance. An investigation by The Washington Post last year alleged that Musk had worked illegally in the U.S. while launching his Silicon Valley career in the mid-90s. Musk has denied this, and in any case he has been a U.S. citizen since 2002. Still, legal experts have said his citizenship could technically be revoked if he were proven to have lied to immigration authorities. And while those laws have only rarely been enforced in the past 25 years, some Trump aides and allies have said they want that to change. Nor is that anywhere close to the only alleged skeleton in Musk's closet. What is his relationship with ecstasy, Adderall, ketamine, or magic mushrooms? Has he ever been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin? Did his colleagues at DOGE rigorously follow information security laws when extracting sensitive data from federal systems? What happened to all that data after it was obtained? At least we can probably can rule out plain old assassination by government special forces. Although, to be fair, that is literally something that Trump and his lawyers have argued should be protected by presidential immunity. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Trump Adviser Urges Immigration Investigation Into Elon Musk's Past as "Illegal Alien"
As Elon Musk and Donald Trump's bromance experiences a rapid but totally predictable disassembly, Musk's archnemesis Steve Bannon is calling on the president to investigate the world's richest man's dubious immigration history. "They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status, because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately," Bannon told the New York Times on Thursday. He also declared that Musk should be investigated for his alleged drug habit. Bannon was a former chief strategist to Trump. He no longer holds the role in an official capacity, but remains an informal adviser and an influential voice on the American far right. Musk and Trump traded blows on their respective personal social media playgrounds this week, not long after Musk suddenly announced that his time as a "special government employee" was over. Once out of the White House, it didn't take long for things to escalate from Musk blasting the president's newly proposed spending bill, to Trump threatening to cancel Elon's billions of dollars worth of government contracts, to Musk clapping back by saying he'd cut off NASA's invaluable access to his spacecraft. Musk also really went off the rails by shouting from the rooftops of X that Trump is in the unreleased Epstein files, and then agreeing that the president should be impeached. We can only imagine the pure schadenfreude bliss that Bannon must be experiencing right now. He's made no secret of his contempt for Musk, who he's previously called a "toddler," and "not tough enough," and a "parasitic illegal alien." Some of that is probably his jealousy speaking: Musk had replaced Bannon as the president's golden boy, a role he lost when Trump kicked Bannon kicked to the curb for stealing the limelight during his first term in office. Bannon, an alleged white supremacist, has always been skeptical of Musk's sudden realignment with the MAGA movement, and has constantly chided the Silicon-Valley-liberal turned Texas-based-technocrat for not being conservative — or racist — enough. So you can bet he's making the most of Musk's downfall, capitalizing on his dubious personal immigration history. Despite his constant slandering of immigrants, the South Africa-born businessman was likely at one point an "illegal" immigrant too, overstaying on a student visa even though he'd dropped out of school to work on his startup. His brother, Kimbal, has admitted to both of them working illegally. Bannon, on top of calling for Musk's deportation, has recommended nationalizing Musk's businesses, too. "President Trump tonight should sign an executive order calling for the Defense Production Act to be called and seize SpaceX tonight before midnight," Bannon said Thursday on an episode of his War Room podcast, as quoted by the Daily Beast. But he faces a fearsome keyboard warrior in Musk, who retaliated in a slur-bedazzled tweet: "Bannon is peak r*tard." Then he doubled down, clarifying that Bannon was, in fact, a "communist r*tard." There's clearly no love being lost between the two. Trump, for his part, is doing his best Don Draper impression. "I'm not even thinking about Elon. He's got a problem. The poor guy's got a problem," he said Friday, per CNN. More on Elon Musk: Elon Musk Declares That He's "Immediately" Cutting Off NASA's Access to Space
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Trump urges Supreme Court to allow mass layoffs at Education Department
President Donald Trump's administration urged the Supreme Court on Friday to allow officials to gut the Department of Education, a key priority for the president that has been stymied by a series of lower court decisions. The emergency appeal landed at the high court days after the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reverse a lower court order that halted mass firings at the department, which was created during the Carter administration. Trump has filed more than a dozen emergency appeals at the Supreme Court since he returned to office in January. In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the administration argues its effort at the Education Department involves 'internal management decisions' and 'eliminating discretionary functions that, in the administration's view, are better left to the states.' Though Trump has repeatedly vowed to get rid of the department, the administration's lawyers told the Supreme Court in its filing on Friday that 'the government has been crystal clear in acknowledging that only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education.' Trump ordered mass layoffs at the department earlier this year. The problem for the administration is that the department was created by Congress, and so lower courts have ruled it cannot be unilaterally unwound by the White House. At the same time, the administration does have the power to reduce the size of federal agencies, so long as they can continue to carry out their legal requirements. And that, the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court, is precisely what the administration is attempting to do. 'The Department remains committed to implementing its statutorily mandated functions,' the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court in the appeal. The Education Department is tasked with distributing federal aid to schools, managing federal aid for college students and ensuring compliance with civil rights laws – including ensuring schools accommodate students with disabilities. Most public-school policies are a function of state government. US District Judge Myong Joun, nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden, indefinitely halted Trump's plans to dismantle the agency and ordered the administration to reinstate employees who had been fired en masse. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by a teachers' union, school districts, states and education groups. Noting that the department 'cannot be shut down without Congress's approval,' Joun said Trump's planned layoffs 'will likely cripple' it. 'The record abundantly reveals that defendants' true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute,' he wrote. The Supreme Court is already considering a related emergency case about whether Trump can order mass firings and reorganizations in other federal departments. 'What is at stake in this case,' the 1st Circuit wrote, 'was whether a nearly half-century-old cabinet department would be permitted to carry out its statutorily assigned functions or prevented from doing so by a mass termination of employees aimed at implementing the effective closure of that department.' Trump's order would have affected about half of the department's employees, according to court records.
