DEAR EDITOR: Alzheimer’s affects everyone, including Medicare recipients. Medicare pays for comprehensive care planning for people diagnosed with dementia and their families. Care planning allows individuals and their caregivers to learn about clinical trials and support services in their community — resulting in a higher quality of life, fewer hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and better medication management. However, in 2017 fewer than 1% of seniors living with Alzheimer’s received the care planning benefit.
Why? Because health care providers don’t know about it or that they can be reimbursed for it. The Improving HOPE for Alzheimer’s Act would help educate clinicians, enabling more families to receive the services and supports that result. Care Planning helped our family find resources for my father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s for 8 years, as well as respite care to help lessen the burden on my mother, who served as his primary caretaker.
Congress should immediately pass the Improving HOPE for Alzheimer’s Act (S.880/H.R. 1873), and I hope that Senator Cory Gardner and Congressman Jason Crow will actively support the bill by becoming a cosponsor. The number of Coloradans with Alzheimer’s is expected to grow by 26 percent by 2025. Almost all of them will be covered by Medicare and could benefit from the care planning benefit, but only if their health care provider knows about it. The end of Alzheimer’s begins with all of us.
— Bob Epper, Highlands Ranch, via letters@SentinelColorado.com