Pass the Comprehensive Care for Alzheimer’s Act

Providing care for an individual living with dementia involves many unique and challenging elements. Caregivers, and those with Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias, have to navigate an ever-changing and costly health care maze. Thankfully, the bipartisan Comprehensive Care for Alzheimer’s Act (S.1125/ H.R.2517) would create a more effective path to dementia care and address shortcomings in the way dementia care is currently delivered.

This bill allows the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) to test a Dementia Care Management Model that provides comprehensive care to Medicare beneficiaries with Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia. Under the model, participating health care providers receive payment under Medicare for comprehensive care management services that are provided to individuals with diagnosed dementia.

Required services include medication management, care coordination, and health, financial, and environmental monitoring, as well as training and other support services for unpaid caregivers. This later point is critical for helping the more than 11 million unpaid caregivers who provide care for people with Alzheimer’s and other dementias. It is estimated that 250,000 children and young adults between ages 8 and 18 provide help to someone with Alzheimer’s or another dementia1. In 2021, caregivers for people with Alzheimer’s or other dementias provided an estimated 16 billion hours of care valued at nearly $272 billion.

Caregivers to patients with AD have been shown to have higher rates of stress, physical ailments, increased cardiovascular disease, weakened immune systems, and poor sleep. One study showed that as the comorbid diseases in patients with AD progressed and dependence on the caregiver increased, healthcare utilization and costs of the caregiver increased2.

Please join me and the Alzheimer’s Association in thanking Rep. Chrissy Houlihan for co-sponsoring the Comprehensive Care for Alzheimer’s Act.

To learn more about this disease and how you can join the fight to end Alzheimer’s, visit alzimpact.org.