{"id":16933,"date":"2017-04-02T21:54:38","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T03:54:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=16933"},"modified":"2017-04-02T21:54:38","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T03:54:38","slug":"legislature-trying-to-find-money-for-aides-to-disabled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/04\/legislature-trying-to-find-money-for-aides-to-disabled\/","title":{"rendered":"Legislature trying to find money for aides to disabled"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Caferro\"<\/a>

Freddy Monares\/UM Community News Service<\/p>

Sen. Mary Caferro, D-Helena, says during testimony last Monday that her bill would prevent children from taking up smoking and create a revenue stream for the state\u2019s Department of Health and Human Services.<\/p><\/div>\n

HELENA \u2014 With so much talk of money during Montana\u2019s 65th legislative session, it can be difficult to comprehend how all that money affects everyday Montanans.<\/p>\n

This session, one group has become the de facto human face of the budget\u2014direct care workers.<\/p>\n

According to the Montana Disability & Health Program, nearly 13 percent of Montanans<\/a> reported having some sort of disability in 2012. Among those, many have developmental disabilities, like down syndrome and autism, and often require substantial\u00a0assistance to meet their basic needs.<\/p>\n

Montana\u2019s direct care workers provide those services to the state\u2019s disabled. They help them bathe, get dressed and get to work every day. But private care providers, contracted by the state Department of Public Health and Human Services, are finding it increasingly difficult to keep direct care workers around longer than a few months.<\/p>\n

The Legislature does not typically set wages for the state\u2019s jobs. However, because the services provided to disabled Montanans are considered entitlement services, direct care workers are in the unique position of having their wages set by Medicaid. Those wages have stagnated at less than $10 an\u00a0hour.<\/p>\n

Two bills in the Montana Legislature aim to increase pay for direct care workers.<\/p>\n

House Bill 638<\/a>, introduced by Rep. Jon Knokey, R-Bozeman, would appropriate $10.2 million to the Department of Public Health and Human Services to fund a $5-an-hour wage increase for direct care workers over the next two years. The money would be limited exclusively to raising wages for direct care workers who aid those with developmental disabilities, and would be distributed over the next two years.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Senate Bill 354<\/a>, introduced by Sen. Mary Caferro, D-Helena, would raise wages for direct care workers of all kinds, including those who work with seniors and the physically disabled. The bill\u2019s funding mechanism is an additional tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, and would raise wages by about $4 an hour by late 2018.<\/p>\n

Both bills passed their respective houses. HB 638 passed on a vote of 86-14, while SB 354 passed 27-22.<\/p>\n

Before the advent of direct care workers, those with developmental disabilities in Montana were often simply institutionalized, said Beth Brenneman, a staff attorney with Disability Rights Montana.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>\u201cPeople, when they had children with developmental disabilities, were encouraged up until maybe 20 years ago to have their child live an institution for their entire lives,\u201d Brenneman said.<\/p>\n

Direct care workers eventually stepped in to fill the role that institutions and mental health facilities once played, allowing people with disabilities to live in their own homes and, in many cases, find employment.<\/p>\n

\u201cDirect care workers are critical to people’s independence,\u201d Brenneman said.<\/p>\n

The problem is that those direct care workers\u2019 wages have barely increased since they were first set over 20\u00a0years ago. That makes it difficult to keep workers employed.<\/p>\n

Kyle Tharp, who uses direct care services and testified on SB 354 last week, said the high turnover rate makes it hard on the people who need the help.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of times, you get to know staff, then they leave because they are not getting enough money to stay,\u201d Tharp said. \u201cThen you have to start over with new staff \u2026 people we don\u2019t know until we work with them enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ken Brown, director of specialized resources at Opportunity Resources, which provides direct care services to the disabled in Missoula, said he had to close a group home because he was unable to find enough staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in dire need of staff,\u201d Brown said. \u201cWe can\u2019t keep going like this. It\u2019s a crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knokey said this results from a collision of government-set wages and the free market.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a clear economic abnormality,\u201d Knokey said. \u201cYou have a situation where we can\u2019t just tell the disabled to go get a job, and make more money to provide for their services.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knokey said raising the wages of direct care workers makes good fiscal sense. He said the current rate at which direct care workers are paid is low enough that they qualify for a \u201cbevy\u201d of government assistance programs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe policy choice is clear,\u201d Knokey said. \u201cWe either spend money on wages that go directly to human capital, or we spend money on government assistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knokey\u2019s bill was supported by a majority of Republicans, who have thus far been opposed to additional appropriations in the state budget. Senior and long-term care, the funding bracket that includes direct care workers, may face tens of millions of dollars in cuts. These two bills seek to mitigate some of those cuts.<\/p>\n

Rep. Nancy Ballance, R-Hamilton, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, supported Knokey\u2019s \u00a0bill, saying that if the Legislature can find ways to fund projects like the Montana Heritage Center\u2014the beneficiary of a bill approved by the Senate last week\u2014then it can find additional money for direct care workers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can find ways to fund this,\u201d Ballance said.<\/p>\n

Caferro\u2019s tobacco tax proposal was more divisive, based\u00a0on Republican opposition throughout the session to\u00a0additional taxes.\u00a0For Caferro, though, the bill is just as much about reducing the number of Montana smokers as it is raising direct care wages.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor years we have heard about this problem of workforce shortages, and so this provided a good revenue stream to solve that problem,\u201d Caferro said.<\/p>\n

Caferro said keeping direct care workers around is key to the success of the patients they care for.<\/p>\n

\u201cMuch of the work they do is very intimate, and the actual person\u2019s success is based on a consistent and qualified worker,\u201d Caferro said.<\/p>\n

Gov. Steve Bullock supports Caferro\u2019s bill, calling a tax on cigarettes and tobacco products \u201creasonable.\u201d He said he hopes supporters of Knokey\u2019s bill will eventually come to support more revenue enhancement measures as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose who are taking care of our most vulnerable certainly ought to be getting paid a fair wage,\u201d Bullock said.<\/p>\n

Michael Siebert is a reporter with the UM Community News Service, a partnership of the University of Montana School of Journalism and the Montana Newspaper Association.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HELENA \u2014 With so much talk of money during Montana\u2019s 65th legislative session, it can be difficult to comprehend how all that money affects everyday Montanans. This session, one group has become the de facto human face of the budget\u2014direct care workers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":16934,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14],"tags":[5711,5710,5709,1122],"class_list":["post-16933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-montana","category-news","tag-john-knokey","tag-mary-caferro","tag-montana-disability-health-program","tag-montana-legislature","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16933"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16936,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16933\/revisions\/16936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}