November 16, 2007 - “Eligibility does not guarantee coverage,” testified PHI New York Policy Director Carol Rodat at a public hearing on expanding health care coverage in New York state. “Attention must be paid to the characteristics of the uninsured population, eligibility levels, and especially enrollment procedures. The demographic, income and work hours of direct-care workers make these design elements particularly critical.”
Rodat spoke at a November 2 hearing in Manhattan, which was held by the New York State Departments of Health and Insurance at the direction of Governor Eliot Spitzer. Explaining how to make health insurance coverage affordable and accessible for direct-care workers, she focused on the state’s home care workforce. Characteristics that make these workers hard to ensure include their often part-time status and irregular hours, low income levels, high on-the-job injury rates, and high-risk demographics, she said.
New York has traditionally done a better job than most states of covering this challenging population, she noted, thanks in part to “aggressive implementation of public coverage programs, facilitated enrollment, and subsidizes for premium costs.” But rising health care costs threaten to erode that coverage, and new proposals for extending coverage must be analyzed to ensure that they meet the needs of home care aides and other low-income workers.
Rodat raised questions that must be answered as New York implements the Family Health Plus Buy-in. She also discussed other options for covering home care workers, such as the state’s Employee Health Care Enhancement Initiative, which is available for direct care workers working with developmentally disabled.
Ensuring that home care workers have health care coverage is important, “since coverage means not only health insurance coverage for the home care worker, but coverage for the thousands of elderly, frail, sick and disabled who depend on their aide to ‘cover’ their needs for that day.”
Rodat’s testimony:
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