How to Start a Senior Home Care Business – Who Pays for Care?

Hi and welcome to 2nd Family, my name is Josh Markland. Today we’ll explore an extremely important question:

“So, who pays for home care?”

Let’s get started.

There are 4 main payer sources for senior home care: private pay, long term care insurance, facility paid, and government programs. As we talked about in a previous video, there is a difference between medical home health and senior home care. Medical home health is paid for by Medicare and include services such as skilled nursing and therapy in the home. Senior home care is not paid for by Medicare because it’s considered non-medical. Therefore, senior home care is an out-of-pocket expense for most people.

The 2nd option is long-term care insurance. Long-term care insurance policies are becoming more popular and most policies have a home care provision. However, each policy’s specifics are different, so be sure to check the fine print of the policy to see exactly what it will and won’t cover.

The 3rd option is facility paid care. From time to time a resident of a senior care facility may be required to have one-on-one care. Most of the time the facility will subcontract that out to a third-party agency – a home care agency. If you have a relationship with that facility they may pay you to stay with that resident.

Finally, there’s government programs. Now as I said before, Medicare does not pay for senior home care services. However, there are government programs such as the VA and Medicaid who do cover a portion of home care services. Now it’s important to understand the specifics of each program because they’re not all the same. So before you sign up, make sure you understand what’s required of you and what the reimbursement rate that you’ll get paid will be.

So, there you have it! 4 ways to earn income with senior home care. At 2nd Family, Our franchise training program does a deep dive on each of those four to help you maximize your income potential. If you have more questions, you can go to 2ndFamilyFranchise.com or give us a call.

Joshua Markland