State Budget Health Cuts Will Seriously Impact Seniors

The state budget decisions made Tuesday were ill-timed, ill-conceived and will impact services to seniors and the disabled.

State lawmakers were under no legal or constitutional obligation to enact the so-called Deficit Reduction Plan (DRP). They could have waited to find out how much assistance the state will get from the federal government and acted responsibly by April 1. Instead, they agreed to nearly $270 million in damaging cuts to nursing home care, home health care and other essential services for seniors and disabled people.

Caregivers counted on these funds when determining their budgets and now will have to reduce services and assess their ability to continue funding their current work force, the very outcomes that the federal stimulus seeks to avoid. These cuts will inflict real pain that will most likely turn out to be unnecessary, since the federal government is imminently poised to provide New York enough additional Medicaid funding through the stimulus package to obviate the need for ANY cuts to long term care.

That pain will be borne by laid-off workers and their families, by the elderly whose care will be undermined and the families who worry about their loved ones.

To make matters worse, state lawmakers acted on inaccurate information when making these cuts. What they were told was a $22 million state "savings" from a cut in delaying nursing home rate "rebasing" is in reality an $81.25 million state funding cut. The actual impact on services is $162.5 million, counting federal matching funds. Similarly, lawmakers believed they were acting on a technical amendment to the Medicaid trend (i.e., cost-of-living) factor, when in fact they were cutting $95.4 million in essential funding for nursing home and home care services.

Ironically, passing these Medicaid cuts will deprive the state of more than $130 million in federal matching dollars when the state advocates for the enhanced federal Medicaid contribution through the economic stimulus legislation.

These cuts make no real sense. And most importantly, they will harm real people and real communities across the state in the weeks to come.