Home Care Budget Cuts Hurt Grandma and Grandpa

As if the recession weren't painful enough for young people, adults and the elderly across the country, thousands of seniors and people with disabilities are about to be dealt another bad hand. In order to handle budget shortfalls, home care has been slashed from several state budgets in the next year. A number of states, including Florida, Kansas and Arizona, will start dropping coverage for thousands of people over the next year. Other states like Illinois are capping programs like Meals on Wheels because the demand is simply too great.

These latest changes follow last year's cuts in states like California, which shuttered programs like Alzheimer's day care centers. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 25 states have had to curtail or cease funding vital programs since the recession began.

Home care programs include all sorts of domestic services, everything from meal delivery to help with shopping,  housekeeping assistance to medical aid. Many older people, as well as many folks with disabilities or short term illnesses, rely on home help to manage with the most basic tasks. Even people who don't live alone often need extra help, as in the case of aging spouses who can't fully care for one another. It's certainly true of my grandparents; while they still live together at home, Gram requires a lot of extra care due to lifelong medical issues. Three times a week right now, a physical therapist comes to help work on her legs, which have given her trouble since birth. If she didn't receive some form of Medicaid or Medicare, she wouldn't be able to afford care that has so far prevented her from using a wheelchair at all times. I'm biased — she's my Gram, after all — but would you think of denying such basic care to anyone, your grandma or not?

Many states are feeling the effects of the recession and making drastic budget cuts across the board for health care programs. But home care has been shown to reduce the number of people who will eventually end up in nursing homes — something we can all get behind. Most people want to stay in their homes as long as they possibly can, but if these kinds of cutbacks continue, the problems of the state budgets will only be shifted to the private sector, where nursing homes are already overcrowded and prohibitively expensive. Even if you're a small government kind of person, we can all agree that seniors and people with disabilities — who combined comprise more than one fifth of the population — deserve better than this.

Photo credit: jenny downing