Harris’s proposed Medicare expansion would be a huge deal

I am fortunate enough that my mother can afford to pay to live in a nice facility that can provide memory care if she needs it. Many families are not in this position, which makes Harris’s proposal to have Medicare cover in-home care for elderly people and people with disabilities a huge deal:

Kamala Harris this week proposed to have Medicare cover in-home care for seniors and people with disabilities, in what would amount to a major expansion of the beloved federal health insurance program.

And while it doesn’t appear to have registered as such in the political conversation (more on that in a minute), her plan made an impression on a lot of everyday Americans who heard about it.

Mike Jennings is one of them.

Jennings is a web developer in northeast Kansas. About ten years ago, he, his sister and his mother became the primary caregivers for his grandmother, who was then in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. She wanted to live at home, and the rest of the family wanted that too, Jennings told me in a phone interview. But they couldn’t afford to hire in-home help, so they took on the responsibility of caring for her themselves ― trading shifts, juggling work and other responsibilities.

“We basically had to drop everything, it was all-hands-on-deck,” said Jennings, who was in his mid-30s at the time.

It was especially tough on his mother, Jennings said, because every time she dashed home from work to help with a care-related emergency, she felt like she was putting her job in jeopardy. And things only got worse as his grandmother’s condition deteriorated, requiring ever greater vigilance.

“She had gotten out of the house multiple times,” Jennings said. “One time she got out during a particularly bad storm, and we couldn’t find her, and it turned out she was sitting in a neighbor’s truck. She was injured. We had to take her to the hospital.”

Eventually the family found a memory care unit they could afford inside an assisted living facility, and they paid for it with a combination of his grandmother’s pension and a state program for which she had finally qualified. But things might have been different if a program like Harris’ Medicare proposal had existed at the time, Jennings said.

“It would have been a lot less stress, a lot less money, a lot less pain … and I think my grandmother would have been happier,” Jennings said. “Even if it’s not full-time, even if it’s part-time, it would have been such a weight lifted off our shoulders that I can’t even describe it.”

I know about Jennings because he quoted and responded to a post I made on social media, on the day of the announcement, describing Harris’ proposal and its purpose. And he was not the only one.

More than 2.5 million people viewed my item on X/Twitter, according to the site’s metrics. Dozens said they too had struggled trying to care for loved ones at home ― or, in many cases, were struggling now.

The proposal is consistent with other major proposed expansions of the welfare state that Harris was offering.

In related news, is there anything more tedious than leftier-than-thous shifting from disdaining Joe Biden as a brain-dead neoliberal warmonger to treating him like the second coming of Eugene Debs so they can shift to attacking someone who has always been more liberal and is running on a liberal economic platform because she’s now the Democratic candidate:

But Harris is trying to win an election in a context in which incumbents in other liberal democracies are getting slaughtered and and the tipping point states are more conservative than the median national voter, and to people whose political identity is hating Democrats that’s unforgivable.