Vice President Kamala Harris is slated to announce a campaign promise on Tuesday to expand Medicare to cover the cost of long-term care at home, a major addition to the entitlement program for seniors and their families aimed at swaying voters in the 2024 elections.

If Harris’s proposed legislation were enacted, it would give the option of staying home instead of entering a nursing facility to millions of seniors and people with disabilities. It could also mean new economic opportunities for more than 40% of people, or more than 105 million, providing unpaid care to relatives who need assistance with activities of daily living. 

The expanded program, though, would be a major new cost for the federal government. Democrats have enacted a long-term care entitlement only to see it become unworkable and eventually repealed.

Senior campaign officials told reporters that Harris will use her appearance on The View, the top-rated daytime talk show, to announce her proposal in an appeal to the roughly one-quarter of people who are both raising children and caring for an aging parent, what Harris calls the “sandwich generation.”

Medicare covers at-home skilled nursing care and only covers home health aides and other types of assistance under specific circumstances. 

Medicaid, the largest payer of long-term care services, covers millions of low-income Americans or those with little savings. In practice, this means that families cannot qualify for coverage until they “spend down” their savings.

The at-home health benefits under Medicaid are also state-specific, meaning that eligibility, benefits, management, and reimbursement for long-term care services can vary depending on location. 

The campaign did not provide reporters with estimates for the cost of the program, but the center-leftist Brookings Institution published a paper this week projecting that such a program could cost as much as $40 billion per year.

Harris’s campaign officials discussed savings from Medicare’s new ability to negotiate prescription drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies, which the Congressional Budget Office projects will be nearly $100 billion by 2031.

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, criticized using the revamped Medicare system to fund the at-home health benefit. 

“Once again, the Democrats acknowledge that federal healthcare entitlements are so wildly inefficient, running them efficiently would squeeze out so much savings that one could fund an entirely new entitlement,” Cannon wrote on X.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

The policy proposal is the latest of campaign promises targeted at caregiving voters. The vice president also announced a plan in August to expand the pandemic-era child tax credit and establish a $6,000 tax credit for parents of newborns. 

The Harris campaign did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.