Op-Ed: Keep Louisiana affordable by protecting Medicare

As a business leader in Louisiana, I can’t stress enough about the importance of ensuring affordability. People are leaving the Pelican State – we are suffering from population loss. This is happening for many reasons, but affordability is a top concern.Which is why I want to talk about an important federal program for seniors. Home health, a Medicare benefit that is overwhelmingly popular among patients and families, enables people to grow older with dignity in the setting they prefer.This program is important, especially in Louisiana where we have a lot of older folks and many of them aren’t wealthy enough to afford to pay for at home care out of pocket.Something else to keep in mind, by allowing older adults and Americans with disabilities to recover in their own homes after a hospital stay, it has the potential to save taxpayers $1.3 billion annually. Despite these benefits, Washington is threatening to undermine this care option. Earlier this year, the federal government proposed a troubling 9% cut to Medicare home health payments. If these cuts move forward, Louisiana’s seniors and patients with disabilities will pay the price.Already, America’s seniors are feeling the damage that years of underfunding have done to home healthcare. In the past 6 years, more than 1,000 home health agencies nationwide have closed their doors, depriving rural communities of care options. As a result, more than one-third of patients referred for home health after leaving the hospital never receive it.That’s not because they opted out of it. It’s because there weren’t enough resources to go around. We need to be strengthening access to home health, not paring it back.Here in Louisiana, 14 home health agencies have shut down since 2019, and more than 34,000 patients have lost access to care they should have received. That’s thousands of hard-working families forced to remain in the hospital longer than they need to, or being moved into higher-cost nursing facilities when home health would be more appropriate.In rural parishes, where hospitals and clinics are already stretched thin, these proposed new cuts will only further reduce competition, close small businesses, and threaten access to care. This is bad news for patients and taxpayers alike. Research shows that when patients don’t receive home health, hospital readmissions rise significantly (35%), as do emergency room visits (16%), which are bad for patients and draining for Medicare’s coffers. Most troubling, mortality rates increase by an astonishing 43% when patients can’t access the home health care they need. Perhaps most disappointing is that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are basing these cuts on Medicare reporting data that includes a few bad actor “outliers” who have engaged in fraud and abuse. Instead of cracking down on those criminals, the federal government is using a methodology based on this flawed data to justify payment cuts across the board.If policymakers want to protect the Medicare trust fund, the answer is obvious: target fraud, waste, and abuse directly. Don’t slash payments in ways that limit care for seniors who did nothing wrong. President Trump has repeatedly pledged to protect Medicare, and I encourage the administration and other policymakers in Washington to keep this promise. If Medicare doesn’t reverse course, then Congress must pass the Home Health Stabilization Act of 2025, which would pause the cuts for two years. This pause would give lawmakers the opportunity to clean up flawed data, fix Medicare’s payment formula, and implement lasting reforms that strengthen home health care.For the sake of patients and our healthcare system, Medicare home health must be protected. Louisiana’s seniors deserve no less, and it is important to help ensure people can continue to afford to live in our state.