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Author: Joanne Kenen

Home Improvements Can Help People Age Independently 

But Medicare seldom picks up the bill
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Journalist Joanne Kenen investigates a program called CAPABLE, which  sends a team of health care providers into the homes of vulnerable older people, along with a  handyman. Their goal is to find ways to improve the senior’s health and also the safety of the home. Kenen also describes the program’s struggles to find funding. KFF Health News posted her story on March 3, 2025; it also ran on the Washington Post. Funding from the Silver Century Foundation helps KFF Health News develop articles (like this one) on longevity and related health and social issues. 

Chikao Tsubaki had been having a terrible time.

In his mid-80s, he had a stroke. Then lymphoma. Then prostate cancer. He was fatigued, isolated, not all that steady on his feet.

Then Tsubaki took part in an innovative care initiative that, over four months, sent an occupational therapist, a nurse and a handyworker to his home to help figure out what he needed to stay safe. In addition to grab bars and rails, the handy worker built a bookshelf so neither Tsubaki nor the books he cherished would topple over when he reached for them.

Reading “is kind of the back door for my cognitive health—my brain exercise,” said Tsubaki, a longtime community college teacher. Now 87, he lives independently and walks a mile and a half almost every day.

The program that helped Tsubaki remain independent, called Community Aging in Place: Advancing Better Living for Elders, or CAPABLE, has been around for 15 years and is offered in about 65 places across 26 states. It helps people 60 and up, and some younger people with disabilities or limitations, who want to remain at home but have trouble with activities like bathing, dressing or moving around safely. Several published studies have found the program saves money and prevents falls, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says contribute to the deaths of 41,000 older Americans and cost Medicare about $50 billion each year.

Despite evidence and accolades, CAPABLE remains small, serving roughly 4,600 people to date. Insurance seldom covers it (although the typical cost of $3,500 to $4,000 per client is less than many health care interventions). Traditional Medicare and most Medicare Advantage private insurance plans don’t cover it. Only four states use funds from Medicaid, the federal-state program for low-income and disabled people. CAPABLE gets by on a patchwork of grants from places like state agencies for aging and philanthropies.

Research shows that CAPABLE participants live more safely at home and have fewer mobility problems. 

The payment obstacles are an object lesson in how insurers, including Medicare, are built around paying for doctors and hospitals treating people who are injured or sick—not around community services that keep people healthy. Medicare has billing codes for treating a broken hip but not for avoiding one, let alone for something like having a handyperson “tack down loose carpet near stairs.”

And while keeping someone alive longer may be a desirable outcome, it’s not necessarily counted as savings under federal budget rules. A 2017 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid evaluation found that CAPABLE had high satisfaction rates and some savings. But its limited size made it hard to assess the long-term economic impact.

It’s unclear how the Trump administration will approach senior care.

The barriers to broader state or federal financing are frustrating, said Sarah Szanton, who helped create CAPABLE while working as a nurse practitioner doing home visits in west Baltimore. Some patients struggled to reach the door to open it for her. One tossed keys to her out of a second-story window, she recalled.

Seeking a solution, Szanton discovered a program called ABLE, which brought an occupational therapist and a handyworker to the home. Inspired by its success, Szanton developed CAPABLE, which added a nurse to check on medications, pain and mental well-being and do things like help participants communicate with doctors. It began in 2008. 

Szanton since 2021 has been the dean of Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, which coordinates research on CAPABLE. The model is participatory, with the client and care team “problem-solving and brainstorming together,” said Amanda Goodenow, an occupational therapist who worked in hospitals and traditional home health before joining CAPABLE in Denver, where she also works for the CAPABLE National Center, the nonprofit that runs the program.

Experts who have looked at CAPABLE see possible routes to coverage by Medicare.

CAPABLE doesn’t profess to fix all the gaps in US long term care, and it doesn’t work with all older people. Those with dementia, for example, don’t qualify. But studies show it does help participants live more safely at home with greater mobility. And one study that Szanton co-authored estimated Medicare savings of around $20,000 per person would continue for two years after a CAPABLE intervention.

“To us, it’s so obvious the impact that can be made just in a short amount of time and with a small budget,” said Amy Eschbach, a nurse who has worked with CAPABLE clients in the St. Louis area, where a Medicare Advantage plan covers CAPABLE. That St. Louis program caps spending on home modifications at $1,300 a person.

Both Hill staff and CMS experts who have looked at CAPABLE do see potential routes to broader coverage. One senior Democratic House aide, who asked not to be identified because they were not allowed to speak publicly, said Medicare would have to establish careful parameters. For instance, CMS would have to decide which beneficiaries would be eligible. Everyone in Medicare? Or only those with low incomes? Could Medicare somehow ensure that only necessary home modifications are made—and that unscrupulous contractors don’t try to extract the equivalent of a “copay” or “deductible” from clients?

Szanton said there are safeguards and more could be built in. For instance, it’s the therapists like Goodenow, not the handyworkers, who put in the work orders, to stay on budget.

For Tsubaki, whose books are not only shelved but organized by topic, the benefits have endured.

“I became more independent. I’m able to handle most of my activities. I go shopping, to the library and so forth,” he said. His pace is slow, he acknowledged. But he gets there.

Kenen is the journalist-in-residence and a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. She is not affiliated with the CAPABLE program.

Remote Work: An Underestimated Benefit for Family Caregivers

The option to work remotely makes a huge difference in many situations
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As businesses consider whether their employees should work from home, they take into account the needs of those with children but seldom think about caregivers looking after an elderly parent, for example, or a spouse. Yet 20 percent of the nation’s workers are family caregivers. Journalist Joanne Kenen delves into the problem in this article for KFF Health News, which posted her piece on May 19, 2023. The story also ran on USA Today. Funding from the Silver Century Foundation helps KFF Health News develop articles (like this one) on longevity and related health and social issues. 

For Aida Beltré, working remotely during the pandemic came as a relief.

She was taking care of her father, now 86, who has been in and out of hospitals and rehabs after a worsening series of strokes in recent years.

Working from home for a rental property company, she could handle it. In fact, like most family caregivers during the early days of COVID-19, she had to handle it. Community programs for the elderly had shut down.

Even when Beltré switched to a hybrid work role—meaning some days in the office, others at home—caring for her father was manageable, though never easy.

Then she was ordered back to the office full time in 2022. By then, Medicaid was covering 17 hours of home care a week, up from five. But that was not close to enough. Beltré, now 61, was always rushing, always worrying. There was no way she could leave her father alone so long.

She quit. “I needed to see my dad,” she said.

In theory, the national debate about remote or hybrid work is one great, big, teachable moment about the demands on the 53 million Americans taking care of an elderly or disabled relative.

But the “return to office” debate has centered on commuting, convenience and child care. That fourth C, caregiving, is seldom mentioned.

That’s a missed opportunity, caregivers and their advocates say.

Employers and co-workers understand the need to take time off to care for a baby. But there’s a lot less understanding about time to care for anyone else. “We need to destigmatize it and create a culture where it’s normalized, like birth or adoption,” said Karen Kavanaugh, MSW, chief of strategic initiatives at the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers. For all the talk of cradle to grave, she said, “mostly, it’s cradle.”

After her stepmother died, Beltré moved her father into her home in Fort Myers, FL, in 2016. His needs have multiplied, and she’s been juggling, juggling, juggling. She’s exhausted and, now, unemployed.

The option to work remotely is no substitute for federal action on things like a national long term care policy and family leave.

She’s also not alone. About one-fifth of US workers are family caregivers, and nearly a third have quit a job because of their caregiving responsibilities, according to a report from the Rosalynn Carter Institute. Others cut back their hours. The Rand Corp. has estimated that caregivers lose half a trillion dollars in family income each year—an amount that’s almost certainly gone up since the report was released nearly a decade ago.

Beltré briefly had a remote job but left it. The position required sales pitches to people struggling with elder care, which she found uncomfortable. She rarely gets out—only to the grocery store and church, and even then, she’s constantly checking on her dad.

“This is the story of my life,” she said.

Workplace flexibility, however desirable, is no substitute for a national long term care policy, a viable long term care insurance market or paid family leave, none of which are on Washington’s radar.

President Joe Biden gave family caregivers a shoutout in his State of the Union address in February and followed up in April with an executive order aimed at supporting caregivers and incorporating their needs in planning federal programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. Last year, his Department of Health and Human Services released a National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers, outlining how federal agencies can help and offering road maps for the private sector.

Although Biden checked off priorities and potential innovations, he didn’t offer any money. That would have to come from Congress. And Congress right now is locked in a battle over cutting spending, not increasing it.

So that leaves it up to families.

Remote work can’t fill all the caregiving gaps, particularly when the patient has advanced disease or dementia and needs intense round-the-clock care from a relative who is also trying to do a full-time job from the kitchen table.

But there are countless scenarios in which the option to work remotely is an enormous help.

When a disease flares up. When someone is recuperating from an injury, an operation or a rough round of chemo. When a paid caregiver is off, or sick or AWOL. When another family caregiver, the person who usually does the heavy lift literally or metaphorically, needs respite.

“Being able to respond to time-sensitive needs for my dad at the end of his life, and to be present with my stepmother, who was the 24/7 caregiver, was an incredible blessing,” said Gretchen Alkema, a well-known expert in aging policy, who now runs a consulting firm and was able to work from her dad’s home as needed.

Caregivers who quit their jobs lose pay, benefits, Social Security and retirement savings.

That flexibility is what Rose Garcia has come to appreciate, as a small-business owner and a caregiver for her husband.

Garcia’s husband and business partner, Alex Sajkovic, has Lou Gehrig’s disease. Because of his escalating needs and the damage the pandemic wrought on their San Francisco stone and porcelain design company, she downsized and redesigned the business. They cashed in his retirement fund to hire part-time caregivers. She goes to work in person sometimes, particularly to meet architects and clients, which she enjoys. The rest of the time she works from home.

As it happened, two of her employees also had caregiving obligations. Her experience, she said, made her open to doing things differently.

For one employee, a hybrid work schedule didn’t work out. She had many demands on her, plus her own serious illness, and couldn’t make her schedule mesh with Garcia’s. For the other staff member, who has a young child and an older mother, hybrid work let her keep the job.

A third worker comes in full time, Garcia said. Since he’s often alone, his dogs come too.

In Lincoln, NE, Sarah Rasby was running the yoga studio she co-owned, teaching classes and taking care of her young children. Then, at 35, her twin sister, Erin Lewis, had a sudden cardiac event that triggered an irreversible and ultimately fatal brain injury. For three heartbreaking years, her sister’s needs were intense, even when she was in a rehab center or nursing home. Rasby, their mother and other family members spent hour after hour at her side.

Rasby, who also took on all the legal and paperwork tasks for her twin, sold the studio.

“I’m still playing catch-up from all those years of not having income,” said Rasby, now working on a graduate degree in family caregiving.

Economic stress is not unusual. Caregivers are disproportionately women. If caregivers quit or go part time, they lose pay, benefits, Social Security and retirement savings.

Most people able to work from home have jobs that are computer-based.

“It’s really important to keep someone attached to the labor market,” the Rosalynn Carter Institute’s Kavanaugh said. Caregivers “prefer to keep working. Their financial security is diminished when they don’t—and they may lose health insurance and other benefits.”

But given the high cost of home care, the sparse insurance coverage for it and the persistent workforce shortages in home health and adult day programs, caregivers often feel they have no choice but to leave their jobs.

At the same time, though, more employers, facing a competitive labor market, are realizing that flexibility regarding remote or hybrid work helps attract and retain workers. Big consultant companies like BCG offer advice on “the working caregiver.” 

Successful remote work during the pandemic has undercut bosses’ abilities to claim, “You can’t do your job like that,” observed Rita Choula, director of caregiving for the AARP Public Policy Institute. It’s been more common in recent years for employers to offer policies that help workers with child care. Choula wants to see them expanded “so that they represent a broad range of caregiving that occurs across life.”

Yet even with COVID’s reframing of in-person work, telecommuting is still not the norm. A March report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found only one in four private businesses had some or all of their workforce remote last summer—a drop-off from 40 percent in 2021, the second pandemic summer. Only about one in 10 workplaces are fully remote.

And remote and hybrid work is mostly for people whose jobs are largely computer-based. A restaurant server can’t refill a coffee cup via Zoom. An assembly line worker can’t weld a car part from her father-in-law’s bedside.

But even in the service and manufacturing sectors, willing employers can explore creative solutions, like modified shift schedules or job shares, said Kavanaugh, who is running pilot programs with businesses in Michigan. Cross-training so workers can fill in for one another when one has to step into caregiving is another strategy.

New approaches can’t come soon enough for Aida Beltré, who finds joy in caregiving along with the burden. She’s looking for work, hybrid this time. “I am a people person,” she said. “I need to get out.”

She also needs to be in. “Every night, he says, ‘Thank you for all you do,’” she said of her father. “I tell him, ‘I do this because I love you.’”

An Underestimated Benefit for Family Caregivers

The option to work remotely makes a huge difference in many situations
Posted on by

As businesses consider whether their employees should work from home, they take into account the needs of those with children but seldom think about caregivers looking after an elderly parent, for example, or a spouse. Yet 20 percent of the nation’s workers are family caregivers. Journalist Joanne Kenen delves into the problem in this article for KFF Health News, which posted her piece on May 19, 2023. The story also ran on USA Today. Funding from the Silver Century Foundation helps KFF Health News develop articles (like this one) on longevity and related health and social issues. 

For Aida Beltré, working remotely during the pandemic came as a relief.

She was taking care of her father, now 86, who has been in and out of hospitals and rehabs after a worsening series of strokes in recent years.

Working from home for a rental property company, she could handle it. In fact, like most family caregivers during the early days of COVID-19, she had to handle it. Community programs for the elderly had shut down.

Even when Beltré switched to a hybrid work role—meaning some days in the office, others at home—caring for her father was manageable, though never easy.

Then she was ordered back to the office full time in 2022. By then, Medicaid was covering 17 hours of home care a week, up from five. But that was not close to enough. Beltré, now 61, was always rushing, always worrying. There was no way she could leave her father alone so long.

She quit. “I needed to see my dad,” she said.

In theory, the national debate about remote or hybrid work is one great, big, teachable moment about the demands on the 53 million Americans taking care of an elderly or disabled relative.

But the “return to office” debate has centered on commuting, convenience and child care. That fourth C, caregiving, is seldom mentioned.

That’s a missed opportunity, caregivers and their advocates say.

Employers and co-workers understand the need to take time off to care for a baby. But there’s a lot less understanding about time to care for anyone else. “We need to destigmatize it and create a culture where it’s normalized, like birth or adoption,” said Karen Kavanaugh, MSW, chief of strategic initiatives at the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers. For all the talk of cradle to grave, she said, “mostly, it’s cradle.”

After her stepmother died, Beltré moved her father into her home in Fort Myers, FL, in 2016. His needs have multiplied, and she’s been juggling, juggling, juggling. She’s exhausted and, now, unemployed.

The option to work remotely is no substitute for federal action on things like a national long term care policy and family leave.

She’s also not alone. About one-fifth of US workers are family caregivers, and nearly a third have quit a job because of their caregiving responsibilities, according to a report from the Rosalynn Carter Institute. Others cut back their hours. The Rand Corp. has estimated that caregivers lose half a trillion dollars in family income each year—an amount that’s almost certainly gone up since the report was released nearly a decade ago.

Beltré briefly had a remote job but left it. The position required sales pitches to people struggling with elder care, which she found uncomfortable. She rarely gets out—only to the grocery store and church, and even then, she’s constantly checking on her dad.

“This is the story of my life,” she said.

Workplace flexibility, however desirable, is no substitute for a national long term care policy, a viable long term care insurance market or paid family leave, none of which are on Washington’s radar.

President Joe Biden gave family caregivers a shoutout in his State of the Union address in February and followed up in April with an executive order aimed at supporting caregivers and incorporating their needs in planning federal programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. Last year, his Department of Health and Human Services released a National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers, outlining how federal agencies can help and offering road maps for the private sector.

Although Biden checked off priorities and potential innovations, he didn’t offer any money. That would have to come from Congress. And Congress right now is locked in a battle over cutting spending, not increasing it.

So that leaves it up to families.

Remote work can’t fill all the caregiving gaps, particularly when the patient has advanced disease or dementia and needs intense round-the-clock care from a relative who is also trying to do a full-time job from the kitchen table.

But there are countless scenarios in which the option to work remotely is an enormous help.

When a disease flares up. When someone is recuperating from an injury, an operation or a rough round of chemo. When a paid caregiver is off, or sick or AWOL. When another family caregiver, the person who usually does the heavy lift literally or metaphorically, needs respite.

“Being able to respond to time-sensitive needs for my dad at the end of his life, and to be present with my stepmother, who was the 24/7 caregiver, was an incredible blessing,” said Gretchen Alkema, a well-known expert in aging policy, who now runs a consulting firm and was able to work from her dad’s home as needed.

Caregivers who quit their jobs lose pay, benefits, Social Security and retirement savings.

That flexibility is what Rose Garcia has come to appreciate, as a small-business owner and a caregiver for her husband.

Garcia’s husband and business partner, Alex Sajkovic, has Lou Gehrig’s disease. Because of his escalating needs and the damage the pandemic wrought on their San Francisco stone and porcelain design company, she downsized and redesigned the business. They cashed in his retirement fund to hire part-time caregivers. She goes to work in person sometimes, particularly to meet architects and clients, which she enjoys. The rest of the time she works from home.

As it happened, two of her employees also had caregiving obligations. Her experience, she said, made her open to doing things differently.

For one employee, a hybrid work schedule didn’t work out. She had many demands on her, plus her own serious illness, and couldn’t make her schedule mesh with Garcia’s. For the other staff member, who has a young child and an older mother, hybrid work let her keep the job.

A third worker comes in full time, Garcia said. Since he’s often alone, his dogs come too.

In Lincoln, NE, Sarah Rasby was running the yoga studio she co-owned, teaching classes and taking care of her young children. Then, at 35, her twin sister, Erin Lewis, had a sudden cardiac event that triggered an irreversible and ultimately fatal brain injury. For three heartbreaking years, her sister’s needs were intense, even when she was in a rehab center or nursing home. Rasby, their mother and other family members spent hour after hour at her side.

Rasby, who also took on all the legal and paperwork tasks for her twin, sold the studio.

“I’m still playing catch-up from all those years of not having income,” said Rasby, now working on a graduate degree in family caregiving.

Economic stress is not unusual. Caregivers are disproportionately women. If caregivers quit or go part time, they lose pay, benefits, Social Security and retirement savings.

Most people able to work from home have jobs that are computer-based.

“It’s really important to keep someone attached to the labor market,” the Rosalynn Carter Institute’s Kavanaugh said. Caregivers “prefer to keep working. Their financial security is diminished when they don’t—and they may lose health insurance and other benefits.”

But given the high cost of home care, the sparse insurance coverage for it and the persistent workforce shortages in home health and adult day programs, caregivers often feel they have no choice but to leave their jobs.

At the same time, though, more employers, facing a competitive labor market, are realizing that flexibility regarding remote or hybrid work helps attract and retain workers. Big consultant companies like BCG offer advice on “the working caregiver.” 

Successful remote work during the pandemic has undercut bosses’ abilities to claim, “You can’t do your job like that,” observed Rita Choula, director of caregiving for the AARP Public Policy Institute. It’s been more common in recent years for employers to offer policies that help workers with child care. Choula wants to see them expanded “so that they represent a broad range of caregiving that occurs across life.”

Yet even with COVID’s reframing of in-person work, telecommuting is still not the norm. A March report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found only one in four private businesses had some or all of their workforce remote last summer—a drop-off from 40 percent in 2021, the second pandemic summer. Only about one in 10 workplaces are fully remote.

And remote and hybrid work is mostly for people whose jobs are largely computer-based. A restaurant server can’t refill a coffee cup via Zoom. An assembly line worker can’t weld a car part from her father-in-law’s bedside.

But even in the service and manufacturing sectors, willing employers can explore creative solutions, like modified shift schedules or job shares, said Kavanaugh, who is running pilot programs with businesses in Michigan. Cross-training so workers can fill in for one another when one has to step into caregiving is another strategy.

New approaches can’t come soon enough for Aida Beltré, who finds joy in caregiving along with the burden. She’s looking for work, hybrid this time. “I am a people person,” she said. “I need to get out.”

She also needs to be in. “Every night, he says, ‘Thank you for all you do,’” she said of her father. “I tell him, ‘I do this because I love you.’”