From our friends at PHI.

Maine has passed a new law mandating the creation of a work group to review the quality of direct-care jobs within home and community-based programs administered by the state's Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

According to the new law, the group is charged with assessing the extent to which DHHS programs meet the following goals:

• Develop a sequence of "employment tiers" including training links that crisscross Maine's facility-based and home-based care services as well as acute care;
• Establish a streamlined, statewide job classification system of direct-care job titles; and
• Set reimbursement rates that take into account the costs of wages, benefits, training, travel, supervision, and administration with the goals of "achieving transparency and wage level parity across programs" and directly covering the cost of health insurance along with other employee-related expenses.