Suit over Medicaid pay rate for private nurses is settled

A settlement has been reached in a federal class-action lawsuit charging that the Massachusetts Medicaid program deprived some of the state's neediest patients of proper medical care by paying noncompetitive wages to private-duty nurses.

The Aug. 1 settlement is awaiting approval by a US District Court judge nearly a year after the state raised that pay by more than 21 percent and created a management program to better track the efficiency of at-home patient care.

The settlement calls for the state Medicaid program, MassHealth, to collect data on how well it is using private-duty nurses, as well as to cover the five plaintiffs' $30,000 legal fees and costs.

Neither state officials nor the plaintiffs' attorneys would comment until the settlement is approved.

One of the plaintiffs, Peter Zurblis of Mansfield, whose 15-year-old daughter, Marcie, suffers from a severe form of epilepsy and requires constant supervision, said yesterday that he and the other plaintiffs agreed it was time to settle.

''We all came to the consensus that it was time to put an end to it," he said, explaining that the plaintiffs' main goal was to boost pay for the private nurses. ''We probably got as far as we're going to get."

The 2001 lawsuit charged that MassHealth, which administers home nursing care for children under 21 who are entitled to it under Medicaid, was making it impossible to attract and keep private-duty nurses because it did not pay competitive nursing wages or overtime.

At the time, MassHealth mandated that private-duty nurses hired to care for severely disabled children under the Medicaid program receive a minimum of $24.92 per hour, which includes the cost of providing health benefits and liability insurance. However, the state reimbursed the nursing service agencies at a rate of $34.92 an hour to cover both wages and benefits, according to officials.

Zurblis said that while his daughter is still not receiving all the care for which she is eligible, the state's coverage has improved since the pay increase took effect.

Before the pay increase, he said, his daughter received only about 30 percent of the coverage for which she was eligible. Now, he said, she receives about 60 percent of the coverage. ''I expect that increase to continue as the effects of the increase in pay attract more nurses," he said.

Mac Daniel of the Globe staff contributed to this report.