Drastic budget cuts in California will severely weaken essential long-term care programs there, according to a report issued by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
The cuts will negatively affect hundreds of thousands of elderly and disabled Californians who rely on long-term direct care — as well as the thousands of workers who provide that care.
Low-income seniors who require home care will be hardest hit, according to the UCLA report (pdf).
For example, the In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) program, which provides personal care assistance to low-income residents who are elderly and/or living with disabilities, stands to lose huge chunks of critical funding as a result of the budget cuts. An estimated 30 percent of IHSS recipients will have their service hours reduced or eliminated entirely.
Similar cuts will occur in other state-funded long-term care programs.
Workers Will Struggle
Consequently, thousands of direct-care workers throughout California will work fewer hours and take home less income, according to the UCLA report.
“It will be difficult for these workers to replace the lost work hours,” write three of the paper’s nine authors in a related policy brief (pdf). “Loss of work hours will also contribute to loss of health insurance for some workers.”
Additionally, all long-term care centers throughout the state “will expect to lay off some staff,” the policy brief reports. (The policy brief was developed in collaboration with the SCAN Foundation.)
Other state-supported programs and departments that will see funding reductions include the Adult Day Health Care program, which administers care to the elderly in a community-based setting, and Linkages, a government-run program that assists seniors with complicated long-term care needs.
The cuts were enacted this past summer as part of a broad trimming of the state budget that is intended to help close California’s $26 billion deficit. In addition to slashing funding for long-term care programs, the cuts also severely reduced state funding for public schools, community colleges, and University of California schools such as UCLA.
