Communicating complex health-care and long-term care information clearly, quickly and in ways your clients can truly understand is a major challenge for aging-services providers. This brief focuses on oral communication, discussing why Medicare and other health-care information is so hard to talk about and offering tips you can use to help improve your communication with clients.

Every long-term care administrator needs to be thoroughly informed on all aspects of the Act and must update policy procedures to guarantee compliance. The potential penalties here are horrendous.

The financing of long-term care for older people is a topical issue, especially in view of demographic trends. A number of key questions arise. How many older people are likely to require long-term care services in thirty or forty years’ time? How much are these services likely to cost? Will the cost to public funds prove affordable? Who should pay? How should costs be divided between public ex...

This study brings together evidence and discussions assembled by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It identifies some key challenges that need addressing in order to start moving towards a fairer, more rational and adequate system of funding. It deliberately avoids proposing a radical redesign of the whole system, though there is a case for that. Rather it provides a platform for sensible discuss...

Home equity conversion for the elderly is a means for elderly homeowners to draw down a portion of their accumulated wealth without having to sell their homes and/or move. The instruments to convert equity have substantial promise for matching the expenditure needs associated with long-term care services. There have been no formal attempts to pair these potential revenues and expenditures, but ...

This paper describes the voluntary chronic care improvement program under traditional fee-for-service Medicare as authorized by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA) of 2003 (Public Law 108-173; section 721). This brief analyzes the emerging issues raised by this new program, including which chronic conditions and regional areas will be targeted, the types of ...

We evaluate the demand for long-term care (LTC) insurance prospects in a stated preference context, by means of the results of a choice experiment carried out on a representative sample of the Emilia-Romagna population. In this paper, these methods are first of all used in order to assess the relative importance of the characteristics that define hypothetical insurance programmes and to elicit ...

Long-term care is not easy to define. The boundaries between primary and acute and long-term care have become blurred. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is no consensus on the extent to which physicians are, and should be, involved in long-term care delivery. The purpose of this article is to explore the current and potential role of physicians in long-term care and the challenges to ...