Day Care Centers

Innovative Day-Care Program Seeks To Keep Frail, Low-Income Seniors In Their Homes

San Jose Care Resource Guide: From  Patricia Grace , (Aging with Grace)  this link to a Kaiser Health News/washington post   article on the  Adult Care Program PACE,  was brought to our attention.

San Jose Care Resource Guide:  This article by KHN underlines the efforts of the PACE program.What is PACE?  A government-subsidized day-care program for adults. Quoting the article:

“…One of PACE’s biggest boosters is Donald Berwick, a physician who heads the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, which oversees the PACE sites….”

Most important question: What are the income ceiling requirement to be eligible for a PACE program: Click Here for the requirement :

“..To be eligible for PACE, a single person’s income must be $14,500 or less; a couple’s income must be $17,000 or less.”

However,  Another blurb for the PACE program has a slightly different take on the elegibility issue:

“…Does PACE serve only the low-income elderly population? There is no income eligibility for participating in PACE. However, most current PACE participants have lowincomes and are eligible for Medicaid. In many states PACE originally was developed specifically to serve adual-eligible population. Participants not eligible for Medicaid pay that portion of the capitation privately. Long term care insurance, if available, also may pay all or a portion of this premium..”

That “portion of capitation”  could be very large!   As always, the US middle class is ignored, and left to their grief….. In our two careers family structure, cases where elderly parents and other family members require low level  daytime caregiving can present a substantial amount of stress to their relatives. Nevermind the risk to the elderly…chances are if the family or the elderly are above minimum wage/poverty level incomes, this beautiful PACE program could be a myth…

Life at the window: at least he's safe....

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