Blog Article

About 60 Pennsylvanians, many with physical and mental health disabilities, protested outside Gov. Corbett's Erie office today about the 20% proposed budget cuts to human services. Protestors blocked State Street at lunch time in an effort to draw attention to how the cuts will harm them and hurt the economy by forcing some tax payers into institutions at three times the cost of providing in-home care and employment opportunities for home-care workers.

Advocates felt so strongly that people refused to leave the street when police tried to clear the road. One person was arrested and others received citations. Soon afterwards, the group moved back to Perry Square to await the release of the only ambulatory person who was handcuffed and taken away to City Hall Police Headquarters.

People need to understand that our lives are at risk. The proposed budget cuts will ultimately lead to reduced services and reduced in-home, community care and an even greater loss of jobs for all the attendants who would otherwise be working for the individuals who will ultimately fall though the cracks and become institutionalized as the direct result of the proposed budget cuts.

We didn't even get level funded. This year's budget figures are closer to those of five years ago which means that absolutely no new persons will be served and those currently receiving home and community based services may experience drastic reductions, or worse yet, may loose their care entirely.

If this scenario continues, it will only leads to higher costs and greater expenses further down the road. Institutional care costs three to four times more than providing in-home community care. Gov. Corbett needs to re-balance the long-term care system in Pennsylvania, not cut services and programs that save money, enhance quality of life, and bring in economic benefits.

What really matters here is that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has made detrimental changes in how it serves older Pennsylvanians and younger people with disabilities.

Over the last few years, policies and procedures have been altered under the guise of trying to save money and cut back on fraud. But you know what? No one asked us, the recipients or our provider agencies about how we felt things could be improved and/or streamlined to save money and prevent fraud without removing our fundamental structures and supports that we fought for years to set up and establish and became one of our country's best systems of independent living!

In essence, the Commonwealth has begun down a path that, IF completed, will take away our fundamental rights to true consumer control and freedom of choice. We will no longer have the ability to choose our payroll agents (what the state calls Fiscal Management Services). The Commonwealth has put out a request for application and plans to halt the provision of FMS by our current 30+ local providers many of whom are people with disabilities themselves in favor of trying to serve everyone either through one statewide entity or by at most through three regional FMS entities. In my humble opinion, this has disaster written all over it for a number of reasons.

First, thirty plus local providers many of whom are people with disabilities themselves could loose their jobs.... Uh-oh! There goes another tax-paying person to the unemployment line! I guess we can add them to the astronomically high (75-80%) unemployment statistics of the disability population.

Second, we, meaning those of us who receive home and community based services through waivers, could be forced to send our time-sheets to some stranger in some far off place (maybe even to another state) which could easily lead to delays in personal care attendants getting paid. This, of course, could lead to attendants quitting and finding other jobs which could inevitably lead to more people with disabilities loosing their supports with the ugly result of having no other choice but to go into a Nursing Home.

Now, not everyone knows this, but a person living in a nursing home does not receive 24-hour care. Not at all. Nursing home residents receive an average of 1 to a maximum of 2.5 hours per day of direct hands-on, face-to-face care. They get showers twice a week. And, if they are lucky, someone helps them to the bathroom before they soil their clothing. They have no freedoms to choose what they want to eat or when they want to eat. They have no freedoms to choose when they want to go to bed or get up. For all intent and purposes, they are incarcerated, imprisoned and reduced to yet another grave statistic which brings me to my next point.

Third, our Commonwealth seems to have forgotten the fact that cutting back in social services as opposed to continuing to our forward progression toward the much desirable re-balancing of our long-term care system, is not the most cost effective solution. Sure, on paper, today, it may save a few dollars here and there, but at what cost to our future? Can no one else in office or in a position to make a difference see that the long term effects are going to be just the opposite? Reducing our services places the most vulnerable citizens of our communities at risk of nursing home placement or other forms of institutional care at much, much higher costs both financially and on a humanitarian level. Cost analyses and surveys have proven beyond all argument that more people (3 to 1) can be served in their own homes than in nursing homes, and those of us who are served in our own homes and our own apartments have a much higher quality of life and far fewer health and medical expenses because we live better, healthier, more fulfilling and contributing lives.

Oh! And, lastly, I almost forgot to mention that nearly every person with a disability has two or more personal care attendants working with us. We frequently hire folks trying to get off welfare or unemployment or parents who can only work part-time because they, themselves must be home after school to care for their children, many of whom also have significant disabilities. Reducing our services causes us to give up our most prized attendants which, in turn, hurts them and the economy overall.

Every singe person reading this needs to contact their legislatures, their people in office at all levels. Tell the folks who make the policies and set the wheels in motion that you want home and community based services to be restored to the greatness it once was in Pennsylvania. Tell them to reverse the changes that take away our right to choose providers and choose FMS payroll agents. Tell them now! NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US!!!

Live interviews at: http://youtu.be/eL6TSifBlZM

http://yourerie.com/fulltext?nxd_id=239292

http://www.erietvnews.com/story/18781220/protesters-block-traffic-in-downtown-erie

http://video.goerie.com/?pl_id=24684&va_id=3553876