Stephen Moses is an outspoken and vocal advocate for long-term care reform in this country and he has a long history of speaking before state and federal government agencies to help shed light on what kind of reform is needed in this field.

He is now weighing in on the impact that the current healthcare reform movement may have on long-term care. He has written a couple of articles on his blog for the Center for Long-Term Care Reform that express his outlook on this situation. Here is an excerpt from one of those articles:

“Clearly, the federal government has painted us into a fiscal corner from which there may be no collective escape. Individuals, especially the young, and the private sector will bear the burden of a long, slow return to financial stability.

By that I mean this: Because the government can’t tax, borrow, or inflate its way out of this mess, they’ll have nowhere else to turn but to ratchet down entitlement programs and other public spending.

Medicaid, ostensibly a welfare program, but always before a de facto entitlement, will no longer finance LTC for the middle class and affluent. The best we can hope is to save something for the poor.

Social Security and Medicare will be welfarized. It’s already begun with means tests that tax or reduce Social Security benefits and drive up co-insurance for Medicare’s Part B and Part D for higher income people.

When current health and LTC reform proposals hit the fiscal wall, government will pull back the traditional social insurance and welfare “safety net” little by little. As that happens, individuals and families will return to savings, private insurance and personal responsibility.

Maybe our Depression-era parents were right after all. Save, invest and insure, they warned. Don’t count on anyone else, least of all the government, to bail you out.”

It’s also worthy to note that even in countries that have “universal healthcare”, they do not have “universal long term care”. In order for someone to receive state-funded long term care in the U.K. or Canada, they have to spend down their savings just like Medicaid here in the U.S.

In short, as we work through the reform of our country’s healthcare system, keep in mind that “healthcare reform” is not the same as “long term care reform”.