News and Press Releases

Proposed Changes to Funding Threaten Hearth

In order to provide our elderly, frail residents with the services they need, Hearth relies on the Group Adult Foster Care program (GAFC) to pay for nursing and personal care staff. With these services, our residents can stay in their homes without being forced to prematurely enter long term care.

The Proposed Changes
Because of the severe budget pressures facing the Commonwealth, the administration is looking to cut the budget wherever they can. As a result, they propose to reduce the GAFC reimbursement rate by 7.5%, mostly by reducing nursing by a little more than 28%.

Why This Strategy Won't Help the Budget Crisis
GAFC is relatively small potatoes in the big budget picture, and the reduction of some $16 million in funding for GAFC will do little to address the problem. However, the flaw with this strategy is more profound:

1. Among the principal drivers of the budget crisis is the rapid growth of Medicaid; and
2. The most expensive programs in Medicaid all relate to long term care, particularly nursing homes/skilled nursing facilities; and
3. GAFC is one of the only tools we have that prevents premature placement in much more expensive nursing homes. The least expensive Medicaid nursing home placement costs roughly five times the annual cost of GAFC! In fact, Hearth has been able to take existing nursing home residents and provide permanent supportive housing at much lower cost; and
4. GAFC is already underfunded, and many smaller providers would simply drop out of the GAFC program altogether rather than lose even more money to operate the program than they do now.

For these reasons, we think the proposed action will result in increasing total Medicaid expenses by far more than the projected savings from GAFC due to premature nursing home placements.

Please call or email your elected representatives on Beacon Hill and tell them not to make this bad strategic decision, and to fully fund the GAFC program.

Thank you