Carol Regan, PHI Government Relations Director, is pleased to see America’s direct-care workforce garnering attention in the health reform debate.

“We wholeheartedly agree that training, better wages, and more opportunities are essential,” she says, highlighting the recent attention given to these issues by Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) and others.

“We also hope that  now, when Congress is debating reforms to our health system, that ensuring access to affordable health coverage for a workforce  twice as likely to be uninsured makes it to the  top of the list.”

Senator Herb Kohl

Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI), chairman of the Senate Aging Committee and sponsor of a number of pieces of long-term care legislation, including the “Home and Community Balancing Incentives Act” and the “Retooling the Health Care Workforce for an Aging America Act,” argued in a recent op-ed for Roll Call magazine (“Controlling Costs Won’t Limit Care,” July 20) that controlling costs and improving the quality of health care are not mutually exclusive goals, and that both are absolutely necessary for bringing us the type of health reform we need.

As a part of achieving this reform, he said,

we must bolster the ranks of those who provide care. As America faces a severe shortage of workers who are equipped to manage seniors’ unique health needs, comprehensive health reform efforts must address this critical shortfall. We can do this by offering training and education for the licensed health professionals, direct-care workers and family caregivers who care for seniors every day.

On July 28 Kohl issued a Senate floor statement on health care reform in which he reiterated themes from his op-ed and argued that we “can get long-term care costs under control by promoting a move toward home and community-based long-term care services in Medicaid.” He also urged raising the standard of care in nursing homes.

Howard Gleckman

On July 20 Howard Gleckman, senior research associate at the nonpartisan Urban Institute and author of Caring for Our Parents: Inspiring Stories of Families Seeking New Solutions to America’s Most Urgent Health Crisis, focused on the direct-care workforce in an op-ed he wrote for Kaiser Health News (“Who Will Care for the Elderly and Disabled?“).

He said arguments about how to spend Medicaid dollars and whether to create a national long-term insurance program are meaningless if we don’t address the “desperate shortages of qualified medical professionals and para-professionals who can meet the highly specialized needs of the frail elderly and other disabled adults” as 77 million baby boomers age.

“Many home aides,” he wrote,

have no health insurance, sick days, vacation pay, or retirement benefits. The Labor Department reports they are more likely to be injured on the job than coal miners. Nursing home aides may get some benefits, but they have little opportunity for advancement and often work in a stifling, top-down, highly structured environment. It is no wonder that in many facilities up to 80 percent of workers quit each year.

He said additional solutions to the direct-care worker crisis include higher pay, better training, more opportunities for advancement, and the adoption of core culture-change principles in nursing homes such as giving more autonomy and responsibility to aides, a strategy that has been shown to increase morale and lower turnover.

“It’s wonderful to see statements like these showing up more often,” said PHI’s Regan. “We  hope people will broadcast loud and clear the message that right now, with health reform dominating public awareness, that including affordable health coverage for our nation’s caregivers is  critical to quality of care.”