A message from HCA President Al Cardillo
Capitol Report | January 2021
With November’s elections, the Senate and Assembly are welcoming many new members. Whether this is your first legislative session or you are returning to Albany during such an extraordinary time, HCA extends our appreciation and welcome.
We at the Home Care Association of New York State (HCA) look forward to engaging with you in this new and unprecedented legislative session to address your constituents’ health care needs.
HCA is your resource for information and analysis on cost-effective home and community-based services provided to several hundred thousand New Yorkers and their families. Our patients and services span a full range: from maternal and child services, to persons living with disabilities, to the homebound elderly, and persons with complex and advanced illness.
Capitol Report: A Monthly Resource
The HCA Capitol Report you are now reading is one way that we notify you and your staff about important issues and new, innovative developments in the field. Please share it widely among your staff. It complements many other ways that you will hear from us, including through: HCA bill memos or proposals, legislative testimony, HCA-facilitated meetings with your office and our provider members on HCA’s state advocacy day, and direct communications from HCA’s policy and government-relations teams.
Budget, COVID-19
Your decisions in the coming weeks will have a major impact on the future of home and community-based care and the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers we serve, especially your decisions in the Medicaid budget, which is a major safety-net sponsor of home and community-based care coverage in New York State.
As you can imagine, home care and hospice staff, patients, and operations have been stressed to the limit by the COVID-19 public health crisis, as profiled in a series of surveys that HCA conducted over the past several months: Phase I (March 2020), Phase II (April 2020), and Phase III (November 2020). We’ve summarized these findings in prior editions of our Capitol Report newsletter, where you can learn more about the pandemic’s impact on the home care and hospice workforce, patients, access to care, and operations. Archives of the Capitol Report are available online.
Other Priorities, Needs
A stable Medicaid financing structure and COVID-19 relief measures also intersect with many co-existing, high-priority needs for the home care and hospice safety net. These include:
- Workforce support, retention, preparedness, and sufficient capacity to meet patient care demand in home care and hospice.
- A supportive regulatory structure that provides critical flexibility for operations, care delivery and efficiency while protecting quality and integrity of care.
- Opportunities for innovation, like our home telehealth programs, models of home care-hospital-physician collaboration, our Stop Sepsis at Home initiative, and more.
We look forward to the opportunity to personally brief your office on any of these issues and our upcoming legislative proposals for the 2021 session. We will be reaching out for meetings. You can also directly contact our Director for Public Policy and Advocacy Alyssa Lovelace to schedule a time together.
Please also see our other articles in this month’s Capitol Report about the state budget, the state’s vaccination rollout, and other policy or program matters.
Save the Date for HCA’s Advocacy Day: March 9
HCA’s advocacy day is on March 9, and we’ll be scheduling other meetings with the Legislature prior to that date.
For March 9, we will be issuing our annual report on home care, hospice and Managed Long Term Care finances and trends, which is based on a survey of providers and an in-depth analysis of state Medicaid financial reports. Last year’s report is here. Look for this report, our proposals, and other advocacy materials coming soon, as well as the opportunity to meet with home care providers representing your district.
Some Additional Resources About Home Care and Hospice
- HCA’s main website at https://hca-nys.org
- Past Issues of HCA’s Capitol Report Newsletter
- Follow Us on Facebook and Twitter
- Slide Presentation: Legislative Forum on Home and Community Care Services (2019)
- 9 Online Profiles of Home Care Providers Doing Innovative and Extraordinary Work
- HCA’s COVID-19 News Feed
- HCA’s COVID-19 Resource Page
- Learn About #HomeCareHeroes Who’ve Done Extraordinary Work in the COVID-19 Pandemic
- HCA’s Stop Sepsis at Home Initiative – An Effort to Screen and Respond to the 80% of Life-threatening Sepsis Cases That Home Care is Equipped to Identify and Intervene on
Contacting Us
Al Cardillo
President and CEO
acardillo@hcanys.org
(518) 810-0663
Alyssa Lovelace
Director for Public Policy and Advocacy
alovelace@hcanys.org
(518) 810-0658