Activists Rally for Home Health Care

Home health care providers gathered at the foot of the pink dome today, protesting proposed budget cuts they say would damage their ability to serve profoundly disabled kids at home.  

Mike McLamore, of the Texas Association for Home Care & Hospice, questioned proposed cuts in Medicaid that would reduce funding for in-home care providers by 28 percent. McLamore believes that the alternative care for these healthcare dependent children, neonatal and pediatric ICUs, or PICUs, would prove more costly for the state than at-home programs. 

"We have both a legal and moral obligation to take care of children who cannot care for themselves," said Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio. Uresti added that the reductions to the programs could cut nursing jobs and put providers out of business. "If budget writers really want to protect the taxpayers, why would they cut funding from pediatric healthcare? It just doesn't make any budget sense," he said.  

The association says the highest cost for daily in-home care for special needs children is $1,220 — only a third of the cost of a neonatal or pediatric ICU. The association says the average for in-home care is just $223 a day, compared to $3,500 in hospital care. 

"The daily is a fraction of what it costs to have them at a hospital," said Anita Bradberry, of the association. "There are some kids that are going to have these lifelong conditions. You can't cut the most cost-effective service that you have." 

Nurses and parents of special-needs children testified in droves before the Capitol, saying that without programs like in-home care, their patients and children would spend their lives in hospitals, rather than at-home with their families.

"They transfer to the PICUs, and many of them live in these institutions and die there. ... Some of them never see the light of day," said Greg Mazick, a representative from Restorative Healthcare and a former nurse of over 20 years. "We really can't tolerate any cut. Anything will devastate our industry." 

Cuts in these services would affect over 3,000 special needs kids across the state, as well as 700 home care providers, according to the association, which has already had 2 percent of funding cut this fiscal year, Bradberry said. To have these children in a hospital, she said, would cost more in both the short term and the long term because of their dependence on constant medical care.