Latest news with #PatJehlen
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Jehlen giving voice to emerging elder affairs issues
BOSTON (SHNS) – Despite funding increases, the top senator on elder issues is raising a red flag about service cuts to programs that help keep seniors out of nursing homes. With demand for services outpacing budget increases, senators 'should be open and transparent about the fact that services to individuals are being cut to try to control the budget,' Sen. Pat Jehlen of Somerville, who co-chairs the Joint Committee on Elder Affairs, said during annual budget debate. 'This is an austerity budget. It's more money. But for many people, the services are less,' said Jehlen, who is 81 and described a friend who was able to continue working because her husband was able to access services. Jehlen filed three budget amendments to try to curb those service cuts, each of which she promoted from the Senate floor. However, she withdrew her proposals without pushing for votes. Two amendments sought to address enrollment caps and other directives from the Healey administration to tighten eligibility and rein in costs for the Enhanced Community Options Program (ECOP), which serves frail individuals who clinically qualify for nursing homes but are able to receive intensive at-home care. The other would have stopped a 6% rate cut coming down from the Healey administration to all Adult Day Health programs, which Jehlen says will result in the highest-quality, local nonprofit programs shuttering their doors. Earlier this year, the Healey administration began imposing a cap on the number of available ECOP slots, providers told the News Service, in an effort to 'manage intake.' ECOP functions as a 'middle-income' home care program for older adults who do not qualify for MassHealth but struggle to afford private care on their own. Home care workers help participants with a wide range of services, including medication assistance, help showering and cleaning, Alzheimer's and dementia care, and cooking or home delivered meals. Without the care, providers say, these individuals are reliant on help from family members or neighbors, or need to be placed in more expensive nursing homes. The new enrollment caps from the Executive Office of Aging & Independence (AGE), which outline monthly reductions for providers to reach through the end of the fiscal year, have spawned waitlists for ECOP. Older adults can still receive basic home care, but their loved ones may need to play a bigger caregiving role to bridge service gaps, said Betsey Crimmins, executive director of Mass Aging Access, which represents the state's 27 Aging Service Access Points and Area Agencies on Aging. 'It doesn't mean people don't get nothing – it means they don't get the higher level of services while they're waiting,' Crimmins told the News Service last week. 'So I think the idea is: How do you do more with less? How do you create efficiencies, and how do you make sure that people don't completely just fall through the cracks?' She added, 'These are really hard decisions, telling people that they can't get services that they need, and that if they had called in January, they would have.' Crimmins said she is querying her members to find out how many adults on the ECOP waiting list had to be admitted to nursing homes. Crimmins said she is also working with AGE to navigate potential exemptions to the new guidelines, including how to handle an older adult who needs ECOP-level care sooner than a slot is available. 'People will wait longer and receive less assistance than they would have this year. That's not likely to be remedied by any future supp budget. It will just be the new normal,' Jehlen said during Tuesday's debate. The administration has said individuals already receiving services will not get kicked off. 'Now that enrollment is capped, [those on the waitlist] may have to wait with fewer services than they need until someone else is no longer alive or goes into a nursing home,' Jehlen said. The administration in February also tightened eligibility for the program by creating a higher spending threshold on services for older adults to qualify for ECOP. One of Jehlen's amendments (#466) would have injected an additional $15 million into the elder home care services line item, which is $278.7 million in the Senate Ways and Means Committee budget. The other ($464) would have given a $4.5 million boost to the $110.7 million line item for elder home care case management. Jehlen said the state 'almost always' has to add funds through supplemental budgets for the ECOP program. The line item for elder home care services is increasing by $41 million in the Senate budget, but Jehlen said demand continues to outpace what the state has budgeted. 'There will be continued increases because more people are living longer and living longer with disabilities,' she said. 'Because of those increases in utilization, we almost always have to add funds to both of those items in a supplemental budget.' Elder home care providers for months warned they would run out money this spring without a supplemental funding infusion to fill big budget gaps amid soaring demand for services. Healey's supplemental budget in April called for steering $60 million to elder home care services, an amount the House embraced in its spending package Wednesday. Even without that money, the state has managed to continue paying providers through other funding streams, Crimmins said. The Healey administration also moved recently to cut rates for adult day health programs, which offer community-based daytime care for older adults and adults with cognitive, medical or behavioral health impairments. There are 140 such programs in the state. EOHHS proposed decreasing the per day and partial per day rates to providers for the basic level of care for adult day health services from $106.32 to $99.49 and $53.16 to $49.75, respectively. The cuts will save the state $5.59 million. The new regulations were rolled out in March, received a hearing in April, and will be effective July 1. 'The administration is not saying 'We're going to force closure of small nonprofits.' And we're not voting to close those small nonprofit places. But the administration cut will do that,' Jehlen said. Despite her strong words, Jehlen withdrew her amendment that would have required MassHealth to maintain and pay base rates to providers of adult day health services at their current rates. Asked about Jehlen's amendments and cutting services even as spending increases, Senate President Karen Spilka said it is a difficult budget year and can 'bring heartbreak… because we can't satisfy every need.' 'It's hard when you're taking a deep dive into the budget and every item, for children, for families, for veterans, for babies, for supporting families — there's so many needs out there,' Spilka said. 'We try to support them as much as we can, and we feel like we're spending, but there's still so many vulnerable populations out there in need. And we can't address it. We have one pot of money. We can't print money. That's all we can do.' Since the beginning of the pandemic, 35 adult day health programs have closed. 'In 2023, just two years ago, the [Center for Health Information and Analysis] found that salaries in adult day health were $3 to $4 less than in similar jobs, and that a third of them were running deficits. Twenty-four were at serious risk of closure. So the administration raised those rates to prevent closures. Now the administration is planning to cut those rates,' Jehlen said. MassHealth said they applied a 33% rate increase to all adult day health services in fiscal 2024. 'MassHealth remains committed to ensuring our members have access to a wide range of long-term services and supports (LTSS) programs. In the aftermath of COVID, the Commonwealth made significant investments in Adult Day Health programs to promote stability,' MassHealth spokesperson Stacey Nee said. 'As a result of these investment, the programs are in a much more stable financial position. Given the current budget climate, MassHealth is recommending reasonable adjustments to Adult Day Health rates.' A cost report analysis from fiscal 2023 shows median profitability of adult day health programs was 7.86%, and the weighted average profitability was 14.36%, MassHealth said. Jehlen said that about two-thirds of the centers are for-profit ventures, and are 'running significant profits.' Those are not the programs she's concerned about, she said. 'They often spend less on care, more on management fees, more on real estate,' she said. 'They will survive despite the rate cut.' The Somerville Democrat said she's concerned about the one-third of adult day health centers that are small- and medium-sized run by local nonprofits and family businesses, which she said often provide more direct care. 'According to CHIA, they are running significant deficits, and have for years. They are the ones that are likely to close. This will be a real loss in quality overall, and it will be a real loss for the people who have received more local, more personal care,' she said. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Bridge aid pitched to keep older residents sheltered
BOSTON (SHNS) – To address homelessness among senior citizens, housing and senior advocates are pushing to expand a Somerville pilot program that provides temporary rental assistance to help older adults stay housed while they wait for long-term affordable options. Massachusetts launched the pilot program last year in Somerville, where housing costs are skyrocketing, to provide rental assistance to low-income adults over 60 years old to remain in their homes while waiting for long-term subsidized housing. The pilot was funded at $113,000 through the state budget. Advocates are now returning to the Legislature saying it was a success, and that the pilot should be used as a model for other programs around the state. Julia Garvey of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless told the Joint Committee Aging and Independence on Monday that 41% of extremely low-income renter households in the state are older adults, testifying in favor of a Sen. Pat Jehlen and Rep. Shirley Arriaga bill (S 475 / H 4015) that would expand the senior bridge housing program. The bill does not have funding attached to it, but Jehlen filed an amendment to the Senate Ways and Means budget (#153) that would fund the expanded statewide program at $7.5 million. 'Older adults have turned to long-term subsidized housing for relief through programs such as state-funded public housing, the Massachusetts rental voucher program and the housing choice voucher program. But waitlists can be years or even a decade long. We do not have the time to wait and must implement a solution that will help older adults who often have complex health needs and are moments away from living in a shelter, in a car, or on the streets, to remain stably housed,' Garvey said. In Somerville, the bridge funding became available earlier this year. 'Our office in the last two months has gotten requests from 55 older adults, almost all of whom were facing imminent displacement and long waiting lists for public housing,' said Ellen Schachter, director of Somerville's Office of Housing Stability. Schachter said some of the seniors have lost spouses, and therefore lost half their household income, or have health issues that make it difficult to work. Some individuals have come to their office with stories of landlords who had allowed them to live in the same unit for decades at below-market rent, but when the elderly landlord dies, their rent suddenly skyrockets. In 2024, Somerville had 247 seniors waiting to get into elderly disabled housing. Four of them got a spot that year, she said. Of the $113,000 allocated in the budget last year, $100,000 went to the Community Action Agency of Somerville to administer the program. With those funds, the agency provided rental assistance for nine households 'that likely otherwise would have been evicted to the street' while they wait for an offer of affordable housing, said Director of Housing Advocacy Ashley Tienken. Of those nine, two recently moved into permanent affordable housing, she said. 'One story that illustrates the importance of this program is about a gentleman that we recently worked with. He was about to be evicted after losing his wife to illness. When she became sick, he had no choice but to enter early retirement to become her caregiver, and by time she died, he had debt, no savings and only his Social Security income, which was not enough to cover his monthly expenses. With this program, he will be able to properly grieve his wife in the home that they shared until he is able to move into permanent affordable housing,' Tienken said. Under the expanded program that Jehlen and Arriaga propose, adults over 60 years old facing housing instability would not pay more than 30% of their income towards rent, mortgage and other housing costs, with the bridge subsidy making up the difference. Individuals would be eligible if they had incomes below 80% of the area median income and are at risk of eviction due to not being able to consistently pay rent, according to the bill text. The bill also creates a steering committee led by the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities to guide the expansion of the bridge subsidy program, with annual reports due every year. Lawmakers on the committee had many questions about the bill, including about its cost and how many people it could serve. 'The cost of keeping people in their homes is so much less than hospitalizations when someone has no place to discharge to, or paying for shelters. So this is cost effective, it's humane, and it's really the only thing that we can think of,' Schacter said. 'My job is to be creative, to think about programs to meet urgent needs, and I think that this program is a creative response to dealing with the crisis we see in elder homelessness in the commonwealth.' WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
