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 entitle🌺ment 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 ag⛦es, ever more of us need h🐟elp 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 deꦑsignedꦆ 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 da𓂃y 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 Reduc🃏tion Act.

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💃 a𓃲nnouncing 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 vaꦺstly outpaces what it takes in from payroll taxes; its trust funds will be empty by 2036.

Washington isn’t facing that pending disaster; the last thing the country needs is a new be🌺nefit t🦹hat will bring the crisis far closer.

A Democratic Congress in 2021 rejected President Biden’s call to spend a mere $15 billion for a new home-care 🍸program; a President Harris has no hope of passing her much-larger proposal.

Which makes the candidate’s announcement nothing but a cynical gesture to exploit a genuine problem — to win votes by raising false hopes with a “plan” that can’t work an🐷d has no chance of becoming a reality.

Harris’ “politics of joy” sure is sleazy.