Harris home-health-care proposal is nothing but a cynical ploy to win votes with false hope

In what may be the most damning sign of fundamental cynicism, Kamala Harris last week proposed a new Medicare home-health-care entitlement to be “paid for” with ..

.fairy dust, basically.Notably, she announced it on “The View,” where she could be sure no one would (could) ask any probing questions.The benefit would surely be popular: As America ages, ever more of us need help managing at home, rather than going into some kind of supported-living institution.

 But the cost would be huge. As Chris Pope noted in The Post, it could easily reach half a trillion dollars a year.Harris suggests a price-tag of “just” $40 billion a year, but that’s derived from a Brookings Institution plan that’s designed around a means-tested Medicaid program.Whereas an Urban Institute plan that better matches Harris’ words would run $400 billion a year, even with a daily limit of $150 a day in services to a beneficiary.Meanwhile, Harris says she’d pay for it with more Medicare drug-price controls, modeled on those she helped pass in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

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Never miss a story.Yet those controls backfired: They capped seniors’ out-of-pocket drug costs at $2,000 a year under Part D — but insurers still had to make ends meet, so they hiked premiums 20% the first year after the new rules passed, and were looking at another 50% increase this year.That’s when Team Biden intervened by announcing a “demonstration project” that just happens to involve roughly $5 billion in subsidies to insurers to keep Part D premiums down — for now.Reality check: Medicare is already headed to bankruptcy within a few years, as its spending vastly outpaces what it takes in from payroll taxes; its trust funds will be empt...