Advocates for the disabled and their providers in Wisconsin are demanding that state legislators conduct a full-scale audit of the state’s new healthcare reforms, known as Family Care.
James Balestrieri, who has run one of Wisconsin’s largest networks of group homes and other services for adults with disabilities for more than 30 years, said the state’s reforms are "a disaster" that is jeopardizing the disabled and their care providers.
"Trying to provide coverage to everyone without additional funding is forcing the state make cuts of up to 25 percent in payments to our longtime residents with disabilities," he said. "There is clearly not enough money to serve everyone. Where are people with disabilities going to go if group homes shut down?"
Their appeals are gaining traction: At least one legislator endorses the idea.
"We’ve built up a grassroots movement calling for an audit on Family Care," said State Rep. Kitty Rhoades (R-Hudson). "Anyone involved with Family Care is concerned about it being solvent. Every stakeholder knows we are on a cliff. It’s going to implode if we don’t get in there with an audit.”
Wisconsin’s Family Care promised that all persons with developmental disabilities would get care under a privatization initiative creating managed-care organizations, replacing managers in a public county system. But critics point out that waiting lists still exist and government funding hasn’t increased to satisfy bigger client loads.
C. Thomas Cook, executive director of Rehabilitation For Wisconsin, which represents community rehabilitation programs for people with disabilities, said more than 100 residents have been relocated to bigger group homes – many without proper legal notice.
"A lot of these people are fragile neurologically,” he said. “My fear is that the system will slide backwards to where we used to be pre-1980s, to using an institutional model, which is basically warehousing people without any program support, a three-hots-and-a-cot approach.”
Balestrieri, CEO of Oconomowoc Residential Programs, which serves more than 1,300 children and adults with a broad range of challenging disabilities and employs 2,000 in Wisconsin and Indiana, has joined others in urging a halt to expanding the reforms to the remaining 29 of the state’s 72 counties. Family Care is now serving more than 27,000 people who are disabled or elderly and are in need of long-term care; the program is supported by federal Medicaid and state funds.
Though state officials promised to eliminate a waiting list composed of 11,000 adults with disabilities, many still aren’t receiving adequate services under the reforms, critics say, and those who are receiving care are seeing services cut.
If nothing is fixed, critics say, wages to care workers, which are already low, will likely be reduced, and management oversight will likely be eliminated under proposed rate cuts.