Human service workers could get raises
The fiscal 2005 budget proposed yesterday by the House Ways and Means Committee would provide $24 million in raises for approximately 30,000 social workers, nurses, and aides who care for troubled children, the mentally ill, the homeless, and for frail seniors.
The money is designed to reduce high turnover and help address staffing shortages that plague the state's health and human service providers. If approved by the Senate and the governor, it would represent the first state-funded raises in at least two years for these caregivers, who work for private agencies hired by the state. The governor did not include money for the raises in his proposed budget.
"It's a great victory for the workforce," said Michael Ripple, director of operations for the Massachusetts Council of Human Service Providers, which represents about 300 social service agencies that contract with the state. "There are still thousands of direct-care workers making under $10 an hour. They live on slim margins, many use food stamps."
Turnover rates have been as high as 40 percent, Ripple said, and because of the low wages, jobs are hard to fill even in the current tough economy. The council and unions representing the workers had been pushing for an increase of nearly $70 million.
The proposed budget earmarks $4 million of the increase for home health nurses and aides who serve Medicaid patients in the hope of allowing more patients to return home from hospitals or nursing homes sooner, House Democrats said. A shortage of visiting nurses has sometimes forced patients to stay longer than medically necessary in hospitals.
"These additional funds will help us to compete in the marketplace," said Patricia Kelleher, executive director of the Home & Health Care Association of Massachusetts, which had been seeking a $7 million increase for wages.
In addition, the budget designates $9 million to hold beds in nursing homes for residents who leave briefly to visit family or who are hospitalized. Last year, the state eliminated funds to hold the beds, but ordered nursing homes to hold the beds anyway if the patients were hospitalized. The money would be drawn from an account that in the past has funded other nursing home services.
While advocates said the House budget for health and human services was generally better than Governor Mitt Romney's, some were concerned about a shortfall in the health care account for the long-term unemployed. The governor proposed spending $160 million to serve 36,000 people in the coming year
in the MassHealth Essential program, but the House is only proposing $110 million. "This program is going to be in crisis," said Brian P. Rosman, director of policy and planning for Health Care for All, which advocates for low-income recipients. "We think they're only going to be able to accommodate less than 25,000, and as a result they're going to have severe problems with people with no source of health care."
The program was established last year to serve people removed from Medicaid by the state and who advocates and hospitals feared would crowd emergency rooms seeking free care.
Becky Maurer, health care policy director for the House Ways and Means Committee, said the House aimed to provide care only for those who have signed up for the new program by June 30. So far, about 22,000 have signed up.
"We didn't think we could afford the full $160 million," she said. "The rest would remain uninsured, but the hospitals would be better equipped to take care of them given the greater funding in the pool" of state money for free care. The budget would increase the "free care pool" money for hospitals by $65 million.
Earlier in the week, House leaders announced that their budget would restore to hospitals $70 million in Medicaid cuts that were proposed by Romney, including a cutback that would have denied Medicaid payments to hospitals for primary care.
