For Immediate Release
Wednesday, January 21, 2004

Media Contact
Kathleen Miller (510) 773-7102

Professors Charlene Harrington, Ph.D., and Robert Newcomer, Ph.D.,* have released a statement detailing the potentially devastating impact of Governor Schwarzenegger’s budget proposals for the elderly, blind and people with disabilities in California. Harrington and Newcomer’s paper states the Governor’s plans to cut $600 million, or about 29 percent, of the current In Home Supportive Services [IHSS] Budget can result in “many negative consequences for individuals including: pain, negative health outcomes, hospitalization, nursing home placement and death.” The statement questions the merits of the cuts to the In Home Supportive Services program on the basis of possible non-compliance with the Supreme Court’s Olmstead ruling, the effects of the cuts upon the already severe homecare labor shortage, and whether the cuts actually make financial sense.

They state that a “prevailing and severe shortage of [homecare] workers” will likely only increase if the Governor’s proposal to reduce all homecare workers’ pay to minimum wage is successful. As homecare workers employed by the IHSS program already live in poverty, further reducing their income could result in a loss of available workers, a higher rate of worker turnover, a loss of services, and very likely a reduction in the quality of care to homecare clients. When requests for homecare service hours go unmet, so do the personal care needs of homecare clients‹in other words, there is needless pain and discomfort, mobility restriction, hunger, dehydration, falls, lack of hygiene, skin problems and even death.

Harrington and Newcomer also suggest that the Governor’s plans to entirely eliminate the IHSS residual program, which currently serves over 75,000 low-income aged, blind and disabled Californians, may be in possible violation of the Americans for Disability Act and the Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision, which requires individuals who can live at home to be given that option as opposed to institutional care. By stripping these homecare recipients of their right to choose homecare services over institutionalization, the state of California could be in jeopardy of non-compliance with the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Finally, they conclude that should the homecare recipients who lose services be institutionalized in a nursing home, the Medi-Cal program will face costs of $43,000 per person each year. The current cost of homecare services for the IHSS residual program, however, is currently only $8,820 per person. This means that if only one of every eight of the homecare recipients who will lose services enter into a nursing home, the state of California will see absolutely no savings from the cuts to homecare, “not to mention the negative change in the quality of life for these individuals.”

*Professors Harrington and Newcomer are speaking as individuals in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Please note that their position does not reflect or represent the opinions of the University of California nor NIDRR or other organizations.