Latest California Healthline Stories
Half a Budget Is Better Than None
When it became clear in January that California’s adult day health care program was slated for budget elimination, people at the California Association of Adult Day Services got busy, cut to the bone, then came up with $28 million in cuts from their $160 million program.
Given the steep cuts the program had already made in previous years, they felt that was as low as they could possibly go.
Well, now they’re going to need to go lower.
New Health Cuts Plus Old Cuts Equals a Budget
The joint conference committee decided to eliminate adult day health care services in California — and then voted to reinstate about half of the program.
The Adult Day Health Care program was clearly something legislators want to retain, in part because it actually might save the state money by keeping seniors out of nursing homes. Drastic cuts, though, might have created legal problems by running afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The solution? The conference committee proposed elimination of the $165 million ADHC budget, and then reinstated about half of it for a revised program.
Will California Keep Adult Day Health?
Senior advocates are hoping a hearing at the end of last week was a turning point for the Adult Day Health Care program. It is slated to be eliminated as part of Governor Brown’s proposed budget — but since one committee recommended keeping it while another committee urged its elimination, the fate of the ADHC program has come down to the joint conference committee.
The committee is scheduled to meet every day this week to work out all budget discrepancies, including a decision on what to do with the ADHC program. But it was the meeting at the end of last week that gave a flare of hope to advocates.
“By the time I went home that day, I had the first sense of some hope,” Lydia Missaelides of the California Association for Adult Day Services said. “And that’s all I can ask for right now.”
Seniors Make Statewide Effort To Rescue Adult Day Services
It’s a big week for the Adult Day Health Care program. A budget subcommittee in the Senate recently recommended shutting it down, while an Assembly subcommittee suggested keeping an amended version of it.
The joint Budget Conference Committee discussing that discrepancy got a little more input than expected yesterday.
Gov. Jerry Brown (D) made an appearance at the start of the hearing. His message was vigorous and straightforward:
Future Uncertain for Adult Day Health Care Services
The verdict is in, and it looks like almost all proposed health services budget cuts have been approved by the budget subcommittees. The biggest dun came at Medi-Cal’s expense — it was cut by $1.5 billion, primarily from lowering the provider reimbursement rate for Medi-Cal by 10%, and by raising rates for patient co-payments.
The largest elements of the new budget plan also call for $1.2 billion to be axed from CalWorks, primarily by shortening the length of time people can be eligible for it, and shifting $1 billion of Prop. 10 money to Medi-Cal.
But one major piece of the health cuts remains undecided.
Final Push To Alter Health Budget Cuts
Throughout the last three weeks of budget subcommittee hearings, legislators have continually asked for input, advice, suggestions for any options other than the budgetary carnage they are considering.
Now, one program on the chopping block has an alternative.
The California Association for Adult Day Services has developed a restructuring plan that could lop 17% off the budget for adult day health services, a program that is facing elimination with the pending budget proposal.
Tears, Fear in Response to Disabled Cuts
Lindsay is a girl with cerebral palsy from Yuba City. Everything in her life has been a struggle, she said — from learning how to read to learning how to behave. But she did it. Made it through school, and now she has a job. But at yesterday’s budget subcommittee hearing, she testified that all of her successes will disappear if the planned budget cuts go through to disabled programs in California.
“If you pass these budget cuts, I will be institutionalized,” she said in her strong, halting voice. “I have only been able to succeed because my mom always fought for me. And if she were still alive, she would have been here in these hallways at 7 a.m., to fight for me.”
As it was, there were hundreds of people crammed into the hallway outside the hearing room, and the line to testify before the Senate subcommittee was impossibly long.
Health Services Making Shift to Counties
Compared to the past two weeks of painful deliberations in budget subcommittee hearings, yesterday’s discussion of the proposed shift of health services to the counties was like a breath of realigned air.
“In a normal year, we wouldn’t contemplate a hundred percent takeover [of some health services] in counties,” Kelly Brooks of the California State Association of Counties said. “But this isn’t a normal year, so we’re willing to consider taking on probably more than we would.”
Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget proposal shifts responsibility and funding to the counties for foster care, adult protective services, mental health programs and drug and alcohol treatment programs..
How CalWORKS Cuts Hit Beneficiaries
The litanies of budget cuts have droned on throughout the past two weeks of subcommittee hearings. In a recent hearing over a proposed $1.5 billion in cuts to CalWORKS, the state’s welfare-to-work program, things got a little more real.
It started with a finance department statistic that nine other states have imposed similar restrictions to the newly proposed 48-month time limit for benefits to adults and their children on CalWORKS. (That limit would end cash aid to about 5,500 families in California, and move up the clock for hundreds of thousands of others.)
“Well, other states spend less than us on education, too,” Assembly member Wesley Chesbro (D-Santa Rosa) said. “That’s not necessarily a model we want to strive for.”
In legislative terms, the last two weeks of subcommittee hearings were “lightning quick,” as Jean Ross of the California Budget Project put it.
The Senate and Assembly subcommittees for Health and Human Services listened to presentations and comment on sweeping changes to social service programs. Any one of those changes would normally go through a lengthy review process, but lengthy is a luxury in a budget that needs to be approved by March, just seven weeks after it was proposed.
This week, those subcommittees are expected to wrap up the business of reviewing roughly $12 billion in cuts, about half of that coming from health-related services and programs.