Indiana advocates seek cash up front for in-home care
INDIANAPOLIS -- Supporters of a state program aimed at keeping senior citizens in their homes don't like the way Gov. Mitch Daniels' administration is running the program's finances.
Indiana's Family and Social Services Administration has contracts with 16 area agencies on aging for the CHOICE program. The agencies manage about $34 million of the $49 million the program gets each year.
The contracts for the upcoming fiscal year only contain about 70 percent of the agencies' funding, or about $20 million. State officials say the other 30 percent will come later in the year as taxes are collected and funneled into Indiana's general fund.
But senior advocates want more money up front, saying the uncertainty makes it difficult to know how many people the program can serve.
"My fear is that I don't know how much money I have to run this organization. That concerns me for the people that I've been charged to care for," Joan Cuson, the director of REAL Services in South Bend, told the Evansville Courier & Press. "The last thing I would want to do is to have people suffer as a result of this."
Cuson said the $6.5 million her agency's contract shows it will receive represents a $500,000 reduction from last year.
FSSA spokesman Marcus Barlow said claims about the funding reductions are false and called them a "factually inaccurate attack to scare seniors."
He said the state sent the contracts out earlier than usual this year, as the agencies requested, with the caveat that they would provide only what the state was sure it could consider a responsible funding level. The rest, he said, would come later through amendments as the FSSA has done before.
"Funding is not going to be lower than last year's level," Barlow said. "We want to maintain flexibility because that's the way it's always been done. No matter the funding level, this is the process."
The CHOICE program provides home care services such as meals and nursing to 11,400 people across the state, with 7,000 on a waiting list. The AARP said unless the other 30 percent is disbursed, many of those enrollees could lose services.
During this year's legislative session, some Republicans sought to divert money from CHOICE to an alternative program Medicaid aged and disabled waivers that receives a federal match. That program is targeted more strictly toward the neediest Hoosiers.
But opponents successfully beat back those efforts.
"It allows people to maintain their independence, while also saving the taxpayers money by providing home and community-based alternatives to nursing home care at a fraction of the cost," said June Lyle, AARP Indiana's state director.
Last year, the area aging agencies received a letter saying 15 percent of their funding would be withheld as the Daniels administration made budget cuts because of tax revenue shortfalls.
The agencies hoped they would get more money up front this year because those state tax revenues have rebounded, Cuson said.
"Why such a high amount when the economy appears to be doing better?" she said.