Home care program cuts could hurt 200 locally

Many could face nursing homes, association says

A state health care association is lobbying the North Carolina General Assembly to reconsider the Senate’s budget cuts to a Medicaid home care program that serves 36,000 residents statewide.

More than 200 of the residents who could be affected by the cuts are in this area, said Tracy Colvard, director of government relations for the Association for Home & Hospice Care of North Carolina.

As of March 2009, Chowan County had 126 recipients of Medicaid funding in the personal care services program allowing a home care aide to provide residents assistance with bathing, grooming and dressing, he said. Pasquotank County had 176 program recipients, Perquimans had 69, Camden had 15 and Currituck had 13.

Colvard said the Senate’s nearly $55 million cut to the program would reduce the program’s budget by 60 percent, affecting the thousands of residents across the state who qualify for state-funded home care and the 20,000 home care assistants who are employed through the funding. With the state Medicaid funding gone, federal matching funds for the program would disappear.

The association’s fear is that residents will be forced into nursing homes if they are unable to take care of themselves in their home or afford to pay for the services.

According to polling data in a survey conducted by Anzalone-Liszt Research of about 600 registered North Carolina voters, 88 percent of those surveyed said they were less likely to support a legislator who cut in-home health care services.

Eighty-five percent of those surveyed said they wanted the state to invest more in home health care that prevents residents from being placed in nursing homes.

When asked which programs should be cut by the Legislature to balance the budget, respondents favored cuts to prisons, roads and transportation, state employment and universities over health care cuts.

Denise Fleetwood, director of the Regional In-Home Health Care agency in Ahoskie, wrote to legislators last week to urge them against cutting the personal care services program. A copy of the e-mail was provided by the home care and hospice association.

In the e-mail Fleetwood wrote that all of her patients have to qualify for the program services and must get approval from their physicians to receive the service. Most of her agency’s patients are women, minorities and live alone.

“What are these people supposed to do?” she wrote. “Their family members live away, or they are working themselves and trust the care-taking and safety of their loved one to us. Please compare the cost of placing these people in a nursing home to the cost of providing personal care services in their homes.”

She estimates the average cost of personal care services is $750 a month. She compares that with the range of costs for nursing homes at $1,700 to $4,000 a month.

“We all realize this is a critical time in the economy but home care is now and should remain a part of the solution,” she wrote. These cuts would greatly affect your constituents who need these services as well as the hard-working women who provide these services on a day to day basis.”

Jill Jordan, public information officer with Albemarle Regional Health Services, said neither her agency nor its home care agency, Albemarle Home Care and Hospice, provide personal care services.

She described the Medicaid’s program to include providing “personal care tasks for patients, who due to a medical condition, need assistance with such activities as bathing, toileting, moving about, as well as housekeeping and home management tasks that are essential, although secondary to the personal care tasks necessary for maintaining the patient’s health.”