At the time of this writing, you and your peers in the Senate and Assembly are working around the clock with the Governor’s office on a final state budget, due in a matter of days.
We thank you for all that your offices have done to meet with us, read our proposals, hear us out on our concerns, and advance one-house budgets that have rejected many of the cuts proposed by the Governor.
We are also mindful that negotiations are ongoing. New provisions could appear at any moment during this critical time period. So too could the reversion of prior cuts or mandates. In these final days, we ask that you remain firm against proposed cuts and adverse program overhauls to health care, home care, and Managed Long Term Care (MLTC) systems including the following items opposed by HCA: the 30-day amendments’ 0.8 percent across-the-board Medicaid cut; the repeal and replace of the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program; the imposition of a National Provider Identifier (NPI) mandate on home health and personal care aides; and the transportation carve-out from MLTC.
Through this newsletter, outreach from home care providers in your district, and other means, HCA and our members have also presented you and colleagues with our own budget proposals to stabilize home care providers through rate updates, a rate benchmark and reimbursement transparency provisions – all paid for thanks to a separate HCA proposal that creates and leverages savings via a home-based asthma management program.
Far from simply requesting your action against cuts or to raise new funds, we believe that it is important to support the home care infrastructure and its patients while sensitive to fiscal constraints and political realities, wherever possible, by packaging our ideas in a cost-neutral way, as we have done with this particular set of proposals.
We also reiterate the inherent cost-savings potential of home care investment otherwise present in our advocacy agenda.
No matter what the final budget outcome, we look forward to working with you throughout the coming months of the legislative session on solutions to the fiscal and programmatic needs of the state; the health, therapy and support needs of patients at home; and the viability of New York’s home care infrastructure to meet these honorable goals.