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January 10, 2025

VOR's Weekly News Update

VOR is a national non-profit organization

run by families of people with I/DD and autism

for families of people with I/DD and autism.

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VOR & YOU:

Please join us on Capitol Hill


May 12-14, 2025

VOR's Annual Legislative Initiative

Washington, D.C.

We will meet in D.C. on May 12th - 14th

for meetings with

Congressional Staff and Federal Regulatory Agencies

to discuss issues of critical importance to

individuals with severe or profound I/DD and autism

and their families.


This year's topics are expected to include:

Preventing Cuts to Medicaid

and

Rebuilding and Supporting our DSP Workforce


This event is open to all members of VOR

Please register early, to reserve your spot


Registration is free until February 1, 2025

So please register now!


To register for the Legislative Initiative,

Please Click Here

VOR's Winter Networking Meeting

January 27, 2025

4 pm Eastern / 3 pm Central / 2 pm Mountain / 1 pm Pacific


On Zoom

The topic for this meeting will be

Addressing the challenges and opportunities of the Second Trump Administration

and the 119th Congress


You must be a member of VOR to attend this meeting.


To register,

Please Click Here


You will receive confirmation of your registration.

A link to the Zoom meeting will be sent to you shortly before the event.

National News -

How Cuts to Medicaid Could Affect

People with I/DD and Autism:

Why Medicaid cuts could be a ‘crisis’ for people with disabilities

Advocates worry about cuts to long-term care as well as Home- and Community-Based Services

By Timothy Broderick, STAT News, January 6, 2025

Rep. Brett Guthrie, (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Health


Americans want Medicaid. The waiting list to receive home- and community-based services through the state-federal health program has hovered around 700,000 people in recent years. A line that long would stretch from Cleveland to Chicago.


The queue may get longer. 


Incoming President Donald Trump has pledged to extend individual tax cuts and lower corporate tax rates even more while keeping Medicare and Social Security intact. To pay for these and other priorities, Republicans are eyeing deep cuts to Medicaid, which a majority of Americans want to continue as is. Medicaid represents over half of all federal funds to states — about $590 billion annually — according to a recent National Association of State Budget Offices report.


In recent years, the federal government has picked up nearly 70% of the tab of providing this low-cost or free health care coverage for people below a certain income threshold. Any federal pullback leaves states with only bad options: enrolling fewer people, cutting back on what’s covered, or reducing how much they pay the providers who care for this population.


“This is not about flexibility so they can manage the dollars better,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. “There’s no way to manage your way out of massive cuts. People’s needs won’t go away. States will be left in a completely untenable position. Even the richest states can’t raise taxes enough to make up for these devastating levels of cuts.”


While Republican lawmakers have not released detailed plans for cutting the program, they have mentioned work requirements, block grants, per capita caps or spending caps for enrollees, and changing provider reimbursement rates. Medicaid policy experts say implementing these changes could effectively end the federal government’s role as a financial backstop to guarantee an individual’s health coverage. Conservatives suggest that cuts or Medicaid reforms that force states to pony up more are necessary to avoid a federal debt spiral. 


The changes would dramatically alter states’ budgets and could curtail or end care for millions of people with disabilities. Two expensive programs in particular could be in the crosshairs: long-term care and home- and community-based services. This would be a crisis as these programs cater to the sickest Americans who would have dizzying out-of-pocket costs, said Katy Neas, CEO of The Arc, a nonprofit that advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.


“Medicaid is probably the one thing that helps people with disabilities or can help people with disabilities at every stage of their life,” she said. “It is the one place that pays for things that nobody else pays for.”


One of the Medicaid block grant plans proposed by Republicans in 2017 would have reduced federal Medicaid funding by more than 30% over 20 years. If states are getting less money, health officials will have to change their own calculus and how they disperse funds. We could be looking at a chaotic “food fight” in every state, said Matt Salo, health care consultant and the founder of the National Association of Medicaid Directors. 

He remembers that when Republicans proposed block grants and capping Medicaid in 2017, “all of the various interest groups — whether it was nursing homes or children’s hospitals or whoever — their immediate reaction was ‘don’t do that to us, do it for everybody else,’” said Salo. 


When the pandemonium begins, Salo worries that states will quickly curtail or end services for people with disabilities, especially home- and community-based services. States don’t have to provide this care, as it is optional for receiving money, but those services help older people and people with disabilities with daily activities, including eating, showering, and managing their medications. Nationally, three million people use community care, which is less expensive than institutional care. In recent years, Medicaid’s funding priorities have reflected the broader societal shift and prioritization of community care over institutional care such as nursing homes.


While states do not have to provide home and community care, other parts of Medicaid are not optional. The federal government promises to fund the health needs of beneficiaries who receive long-term services and supports, now and decades into the future. More than 8 million people currently use these services, which cost the U.S. over $400 billion in 2022. People with disabilities comprise the bulk of this population. 


This could change with per capita caps. The current chair of the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) told Axios he wants to cap the federal Medicaid funds that states receive for each enrollee, reviving a failed proposal from 2017. If an individual incurs health care costs that exceed that limit, states would have to figure out how to fund that care. That would be a worst-case scenario for Medicaid, according to Alker.


Read the full article here

House Republicans Actively Considering Deep and Damaging Cuts to Medicaid

By Edwin Park and Joan Alker, Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, Center for Children and Families, January 9, 2025


As we have previously written, since the November election, Congressional Republican leaders have been increasingly open about their intent to make deeply damaging cuts to Medicaid. Now, at a caucus retreat on January 4th, House Republicans actively discussed policy options to cut federal Medicaid spending — including converting Medicaid to a per capita cap — for inclusion in budget reconciliation legislation this year, according to both Politico and Axios. This discussion was teed up by a “handshake agreement” several days before Christmas made by House Republican leaders with dissident members of the House Republican caucus who initially refused (after intervention by Elon Musk) to allow an end-of-year appropriations bill to be considered and avoid a government shutdown. It has been widely reported that the leaders agreed to enact $2.5 trillion of cuts in mandatory spending as part of budget reconciliation in 2025.


Representative Brett Guthrie (R-KY), the new chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicaid, told Politico that he had presented a per capita cap proposal to the House Republican caucus. Under the current federal-state financial partnership, the federal government pays a fixed percentage of states’ Medicaid costs, whatever those costs are. A per capita cap would radically restructure Medicaid financing: states would receive only a fixed amount of federal Medicaid funding on a per-beneficiary basis, irrespective of states’ actual costs. These funding caps are typically designed to fail to keep pace with expected growth in health care costs in order to severely cut federal Medicaid spending, with those cuts growing larger and larger over time. Moreover, the caps would also fail to account for any unexpected cost growth such as from another public health emergency or a new, costly drug therapy, which would make the federal funding cuts even larger than originally anticipated.


The push to make these kind of draconian Medicaid cuts has now accelerated in the wake of the December pledge of House Republican leadership to make at least $2.5 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending as part of budget reconciliation, paired with an increase in the debt ceiling (and to partially offset trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations). Mandatory spending includes programs like Medicare and Medicaid; however, President-elect Trump repeatedly said on the campaign trail that he would not cut Medicare or Social Security. House Speaker Mike Johnson has also recently reiterated that House Republicans would not seek to cut Medicare benefits in reconciliation (with Social Security generally not includable). As Energy and Commerce Chair Guthrie said to Axios: “We have to have savings. I’m sure Medicaid reform is going to be a part of it.” In December, Representative Guthrie had previously expressed support for a Medicaid per capita cap as a key means to satisfying this mandatory cut pledge. In addition, Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX), chair of the House Budget Committee, is now aggressively pushing his fiscal year 2025 budget resolution from last year (reported out of the Committee in March 2024) including its Medicaid cuts of $2.2 trillion over 10 years. He is also circulating a menu of potential mandatory spending cuts among the House Republican caucus that includes largely similar Medicaid cuts totaling $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The target on Medicaid’s back is thus growing larger and more immediate.


Read the full article here

Medicaid Per Capita Cap Would Harm Millions of People by Forcing Deep Cuts and Shifting Costs to States

By Gideon Lukens and Elizabeth Zhang, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, January 7, 2025


Recent proposals from Republican congressional leaders and a conservative think tank would impose a per capita cap on federal Medicaid funding or, similarly, turn Medicaid into a block grant. These proposals would dramatically change Medicaid’s funding structure, deeply cut federal funding, and shift costs and financial risks to states. Faced with large and growing reductions in federal funding, states would cut eligibility and benefits, leaving millions of people without health coverage and access to needed care.


Before resurrecting harmful per capita cap proposals, policymakers should consider how similar past proposals would have impacted states’ budgets and thus their ability to support Medicaid enrollees. This paper presents a case study with historical data to illustrate the impact on different states had Congress implemented a per capita cap in 2018; nearly every state examined would have exceeded its cap — and thus lost substantial federal funding — in one or more of the following four years.


Per Capita Cap Designed to Cut Medicaid by Growing Amounts Over Time

The federal government pays a fixed share of states’ Medicaid costs, which gives them the predictability they need to run their programs because the amount they receive is based on actual costs incurred. Under a per capita cap, the federal government would instead pay states no more than a fixed amount of funding per enrollee, leaving states responsible for all remaining costs.


A per capita cap is designed to cut federal Medicaid funding by setting spending limits well below what would be needed to keep pace with rising health care costs. Each state would be assigned its own initial per capita cap based on the state’s current or historical spending; this amount would be set to increase each year at a rate below the growth in per capita health care spending. Thus, the cuts would increase over time. Even a proposal with modest annual cuts in the initial years would produce large (and ever-growing) annual cuts in later years. As the annual cuts grow, the cumulative cut to federal funding would grow increasingly rapidly. (See Figure 1).

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated various scenarios by which Congress could cap Medicaid spending and found that a per enrollee cap would cut federal spending by between $588 billion and $893 billion over nine years, depending on the annual rate at which federal funding would be permitted to grow under the cap. An overall cap (also known as a block grant) functions similarly to a per capita cap, except states would receive a fixed dollar amount that wouldn’t adjust for changes in enrollment. An overall cap would cut federal spending by between $459 billion and $742 billion.


CBO estimates that federal funding reductions of this magnitude would cause states to cut Medicaid coverage, including some states dropping the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansion, along with other cost-cutting actions such as reducing Medicaid benefits and provider payments. CBO estimates that about half of the people losing Medicaid coverage would become uninsured. In a previous analysis, CBO noted that under a per capita cap or overall cap, households could face significant increases in medical debt and bankruptcies.


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Case Study: What if a Per Capita Cap Had Been Implemented in 2018?

The following case study uses historical data to illustrate the impact on different states if a per capita cap had been implemented in 2018. It does not reflect a specific proposal but rather policies similar to multiple proposals, including the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which passed the House in April 2017, and the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), which was proposed in the Senate in June 2017.


In line with proposals such as the AHCA and BCRA, which assigned each state a separate cap for each eligibility group, our examples include separate caps for enrollees with disabilities, adults aged 65 or older, children, adults eligible through the ACA Medicaid expansion, and other adults not eligible through the ACA expansion. Per capita caps could instead assign a single cap for all Medicaid enrollees, regardless of eligibility group, but this would incentivize states to aggressively limit spending for populations with greater health care costs (and needs), such as people with disabilities and seniors.


We use data from fiscal years 2018 to 2022, the longest period for which comparable data are available, and exclude nine states and the District of Columbia due to data quality issues, restricting our analysis to the remaining 41 states. We assume that baseline spending per person is based on full-benefit spending in each eligibility group in fiscal year 2018, and that the caps adjust each year according to a pre-established growth factor.


Almost All States Would Have Exceeded Per Capita Cap

On average across the U.S., Medicaid costs per person rose roughly in line with historical trends in 2019 and 2020 and then grew more slowly in 2021 and 2022, in part due to the pandemic-related continuous coverage provision. Yet many states still would have exceeded the caps during the slower growth period in 2021 and 2022 due to faster initial growth in spending in 2019 and 2020.


Please read the full article here


Read a related article from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities here

Other National News:

New Law Requires HHS to Publish Resources for People With Disabilities

Home Care, January 9, 2025


On Saturday, Jan. 4, 2025, President Joe Biden signed into law HR 670, also known as the Think Differently Database Act, which requires the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish a website to provide information on resources available to individuals with a disability and their caregivers and families.


"Thank you to Representatives Molinaro and Sherrill, and Senators Schmitt and Ossoff for their leadership," the White House said in a briefing.


According to HR 670, the Secretary of Health and Human Services has three years from the enactment date to establish and update the website. 


The website must include:

  • Information about eligibility, points of contact and covered long-term services and associated wait lists.
  • Information about how to contact each State’s Medicaid office for information about Medicaid, including links and phone numbers for State contacts.
  • Where applicable, the average amount of time that individuals newly enrolled in a State’s waiver program for home and community-based services in the past 12 months were on the list of individuals waiting to enroll in such waiver program.

Additionally, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) must promote the website to appropriate individuals, such as by collaborating with the Social Security Administration.


For a full list of what the website will be required to provide information on, see the full law here. 


Link to the article here

The Labor Crisis Putting People With Disabilities at Risk

By Isabel Ruehl, The Nation, January 10, 2025


n a crisp morning in April, Ed Bartz lay awake in his bed in Troy, New York. According to his digital alarm clock, which had been carefully positioned to stand in his line of vision, he’d been like this for an hour—awake, aware, worried.


But Ed couldn’t do anything about it. He was born with cerebral palsy, and at 61, his impairments had grown worse. “I am basically a head without a working body,” he told me. At around 11 each night, somebody from The Arc of Rensselaer County, a disability service organization, helped him settle in for sleep; at eight each morning, someone else came to pull up the blinds. Today, that person was supposed to be Yazlin. She would lift him into the shower, bathe him, pull fresh clothes over his body, get him into his motorized chair, set up his assistive technology, and make breakfast.


But Yazlin hadn’t shown up when she usually did. Ed’s heart beat hard. Had she been in an accident?

As it turned out, Yazlin was simply running late. “When they get here I immediately ask if everything in their life is OK,” Ed explained later, by e-mail. (He can move his head enough to type, slowly, by wearing a reflective sensor on his forehead that acts as a mouse, and using this on his communication device, a keyboard technology that generates speech.) “I get angry because my morning is wasting away while I’m waiting for help, but showing this anger is fruitless. I need HELP! But getting angry doesn’t help anybody.” Although Ed sometimes experiences this two or three times in one week, the feeling of panic never quite goes away. Several times, no one has shown up at all.


“Most of the time I think very little about my disability,” Ed said, “but when people don’t show up when expected, it slaps me in the face how reliant I am on others. I form bonds with the people who help me. When people don’t show up, I begin to feel like I’m just a job.”


Yazlin is a direct support provider, or DSP. DSPs provide crucial care for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities—a population that tops 8.3 million nationwide—often fulfilling many roles at once, such as nurse, dietician, occupational therapist, chauffeur, personal trainer, and job coach. At the same time, they must perform basic caretaking functions, like helping with medicine, grocery shopping, cooking, and personal care and hygiene.


“Their work is highly complex and goes well beyond caregiving,” said Joseph Macbeth, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Direct Support Professionals (NADSP). And a DSP supports several people at once, across many settings—residential group homes, community job sites, vocational and day programs. They form highly individualized relationships that take time to foster and finesse. Ed describes these relationships as “very personal”: “How could they not be? They are helping me with very personal aspects of my life.”


Yet the median hourly wage of a DSP is just $15.98 (and this is expected to decrease when funding from the American Rescue Plan Act expires in March 2025). As a result, the workforce is chronically understaffed and overworked, straining to provide round-the-clock care for people whose lives depend on it—and inevitably falling short. The profession has been in “crisis” since its very beginning in the 1970s, says Macbeth—and suffers most during a strong economy, when people can find better paying jobs (with less accountability) outside the caregiving workforce.


Currently, 90 percent of agencies that employ DSPs nationwide report “moderate” or “severe” staffing shortages, and as a result, 69 percent experience difficulty meeting established quality standards (as set at the agency level, because there is no federal set of quality measures to date). In 2023, the average turnover ratio for DSPs was 40 percent, with 87 percent of DSPs staying on the job for fewer than 36 months. The vacancy rate for full-time positions was as high as 18 percent.


And because of such ongoing shortages, in the past year, nearly three-quarters of respondents had to turn away new referrals. In 2024, over half a million people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were on their state’s waiting list to receive services, with nowhere to go. Usually this means remaining in family homes, with no support beyond cobbling together care from private networks. Others—who may not have family, or who have needs that the family is unable to support—often wind up in hospitals, psychiatric centers, or homeless shelters.


Continued

Please share this offer with your loved one's

Direct Support Professionals!


VOR ❤️s OUR

DIRECT SUPPORT PROFESSIONALS!


Our loved ones' caregivers are essential to their health, safety, and happiness.

In appreciation of their good work and kind hearts, VOR offers free digital memberships to any DSP who would like to receive our newsletter.


We encourage our members to speak with their loved ones' caregivers to extend this offer of our gratitude.


If you are a Direct Support Professional interested in receiving our newsletter and e-content, please write us at


info@vor.net


with your name, email address, and the name of the facility at which you work. Please include the name of the VOR member who told you of this offer.

Sheltered Workshops and 14(c):

Take Action!


The Department of Labor's Wage & Hour Division has issued a proposed role in the Federal Register that would phase out the use of Commensurate Wages under Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act.


There is a comment period from now until January 17th, and we ask our members to send comments to the Wage & Hour Division to express your opposition to this rule and your support of 14(c) provisions for people with intellectual disabilities and autism.


To download the document from VOR's website, please click here

To post a comment opposing this rule, please click here

Don’t take away jobs from Intellectually Disabled Workers 

Opinion by Rick Wilson (A-Teams USA), The Hill, January 4, 2025


For years, disagreements have raged within the disability community regarding the federal Special Minimum Wage (SMW), which by law allows certain employers to operate work centers in which they pay intellectually/developmentally disabled (IDD) individuals less than the federal minimum wage. Such employers, overwhelmingly nonprofit service providers known as Community Rehabilitation Programs, were first established many decades ago, often by groups of parents, in order to provide a place for IDD individuals to work. The SMW allows these workers to be paid on the basis of their productivity. 


On Dec. 3, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that they intend to issue a rule that will phase out the Special Minimum Wage. 


For those unfamiliar with SMW work centers, this may seem like a good idea. After all, isn’t this just a matter of fairness? Disability rights advocacy organizations have lobbied hard for the elimination of the SMW. They have labeled it the “subminimum wage” in order to connotate that these workers are being unfairly treated. 


A number of states have taken unilateral action to eliminate the SMW, which has forced many nonprofits to close their work programs, as they are then financially unsustainable, relegating many of their workers to day care programs or just staying at home. Data from the Government Accountability Office shows that approximately 390,000 14(c) jobs have been lost since 2001. 


Further, data from the Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) at the University of Massachusetts reports a multi-year trend of increasing numbers of IDD individuals in non-work pursuits, primarily adult day care. While day care is a valuable service for many, how can anyone say it is a preferable option for those who want to work but are only capable of working in the environment of a SMW work center program? 


The Department of Labor seems to think that all IDD individuals are capable of regular jobs with the proper supports, and that there are plenty of jobs out there for them. Common sense should tell anyone that this is not true. 


The ICI reports that, in 2021, only 22 percent of IDD individuals attained jobs in the general workforce. Anyone who has worked closely in the disability field should realize that there is a wide range of disability in the IDD community, from mild to profound, and that many of these individuals cannot succeed at regular jobs.  


Continued

State News:

State Rep: Protect disabled Texans from unscrupulous group homes

By Chris Turner, The Dallas Morning News, January 8, 2025

(Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, represents District 101 in the Texas House of Representatives.)



One ride-along was on a chilly spring morning in Grand Prairie, the other on a hot summer day in Arlington. Both times, my staff and I accompanied police officers and social workers as they checked on nondescript neighborhoods in and around my legislative district. On both occasions, we observed deeply disturbing scenes.


The addresses we visited are known as group homes and, in some cases, boarding homes. Each home may be inhabited by three or four individuals, often folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities, or IDD.


Some of the homes appeared to be doing a good job for their residents. Others, however, were dark, dirty and messy. One home that was without residents when we visited had aquariums and cages inhabited by reptiles, frogs and exotic cockroaches.


The caregivers on duty in many of these facilities did not seem bothered by the conditions people were living in, nor did they seem especially attuned to residents’ needs. Again, this is not every group home, but is the case in too many.


For the last three years, I have been working to strengthen the safety net for Texans with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I got involved in this issue when a constituent asked for help. Tragically, his son had been shot to death by his group home caregiver.


In 2023, I championed two measures that passed into law: requiring federal background checks for all workers and ensuring that caregivers found guilty of misconduct cannot continue to work in group homes. Those reforms were a good start, but more must be done.


At the risk of oversimplifying a complicated topic, there are two categories of homes in residential neighborhoods that provide services for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Group homes receive funding from Medicaid or Medicare. While these homes are subject to some government oversight, they are not licensed, have patchwork and flimsy regulations at best, and are overseen by a state agency lacking the resources to do so sufficiently. Caregivers at these homes are typically paid $10.60 per hour.


It was this type of facility where my constituent’s son was killed. There are documented reports of residents in these homes being injured while unsupervised, neglected to the point of malnourishment and financially exploited. Deaths in these homes occur far too often, and when they do, answers are difficult for loved ones to get.


The other homes are often called unlicensed community homes, unlicensed assisted living facilities or “bed and boards.” These facilities often advertise similar services as group homes, but do not take government money and are therefore completely unregulated by the state. In addition to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, residents may be elderly, sick or simply have nowhere else to go.


Texas must not allow vulnerable people to be subjected to abuse, mistreatment and neglect. If the measure of a society is how it cares for its most vulnerable, we are failing.


First, we must increase wages for caregivers — they have difficult, taxing jobs. Currently, someone can earn more at a fast food restaurant than by caring for residents in a group home.


We must also ensure reports of abuse in these facilities are fully investigated in a timely way. That requires more resources for our overextended Health and Human Services Commission.


We must tighten laws to make sure they don’t allow abuse, exploitation, neglect and dangerous conditions. And we can’t let unscrupulous people get away with operating unlicensed assisted living facilities under the guise of a “bed and board.” I am filing measures to address these problems in the upcoming legislative session.


Read the full editorial here

Massachusetts - Our priorities for the 2025-2026 legislative session

By Dave Kassel, The COFAR Blog, January 9, 2025


The 2025-2026 session of the Massachusetts Legislature began on January 1 of this year. So we are taking this opportunity to announce our priorities for this 194th legislative session.


Admissions should be opened to the ICFs and state-operated group homes


We are seeking the filing and passage of legislation that would require the Department of Developmental Services (DDS) to offer the Wrentham Developmental Center, the Hogan Regional Center and state-operated group homes as options for persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) who are seeking residential placements in Massachusetts.


Unless the administration agrees to open those facilities to new admissions, they will eventually close. DDS data show the number of residents or the census at both the Wrentham Developmental Center and Hogan Regional Center continued to drop from Fiscal Years 2019 through 2024.


The census at Wrentham dropped from 323 in Fiscal 2015 to 159 in Fiscal 2025 – a 50% drop. The census at Hogan dropped from 159 in Fiscal 2011 to 88 in Fiscal 2024 – a 45% drop.


From Fiscal 2008 to 2021, the census in the state-run group home system dropped from 1,059 to 1,023 – a 3.4% decrease.


Meanwhile, the census in the state’s much larger network of privatized group homes continued to climb during that same period, rising from 6,677 to 8,290 — a 24% increase.


Currently, the privatized group home system in Massachusetts is providing substandard care even as thousands of individuals continue to wait for residential placements.


Even the Arc of Massachusetts, which has pushed for the closures of all remaining ICFs, has acknowledged a “systemic failure” in the largely privatized DDS system in which thousands of persons with I/DD are unable to get services.


Continued

Vermont Care Partners addresses the housing crisis for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Vermont

The impact of homelessness on people with I/DD is far-reaching  

Press release from Vermont Care Partners, VT Digger, January 9, 2025


Vermont is facing an unprecedented housing crisis, and one of the most vulnerable populations—the intellectually and developmentally disabled (I/DD)—is at significant risk of homelessness. This crisis has been exacerbated by recent changes to the General Assistance (GA) Emergency Housing program, leaving many individuals, including those with disabilities, without a place to call home.


The impact of homelessness on people with I/DD is far-reaching. It exposes them to physical harm, mental health crises, and exploitation, and disrupts the critical support services they rely on, such as medical care, therapy, and life-skills support. For these individuals, the gap between having a home and becoming homeless is dangerously thin, and the consequences are devastating.


Vermont Care Partners (VCP) is a statewide network dedicated to supporting individuals with I/DD, as well as those with mental health and substance use needs, to maintain independence and well-being. While not housing providers in the traditional sense, VCP agencies play an essential role in addressing the housing crisis by helping individuals find appropriate housing, navigate complex systems, and provide the ongoing support necessary to ensure individuals can live successfully in their communities. 


Traditionally, the Vermont System of Care has primarily invested in the Shared Living Provider model. This model is utilized by all Designated and Specialized service agencies which allows people to live with a person or family in their home with built in support. This model works for many people but does not work for a growing number of people. 


VCP agencies are facing significant challenges due to staffing shortages, limited funding, and the increasing demand for housing solutions. The crisis is not only a challenge for these service providers but for the entire state. Without adequate support, vulnerable individuals risk losing the stability that housing provides.


By prioritizing immediate support and long-term stability, Vermont can better provide every individual with a place to call home. No one should fear homelessness, and no one should have to navigate the system alone. 


As Julie Cunningham, Executive Director of Families First, emphasized, “Everyone is responsible for the housing crisis our state is experiencing. It is not just the job of housing authorities or service agencies—this is a collective issue that impacts us all.” Addressing this crisis requires a shared effort from all sectors of society—housing authorities, service providers, and community members alike.


Ensuring stable housing for people with I/DD in Vermont delivers significant returns that extend far beyond the immediate need for shelter. Housing stability reduces the strain on public healthcare systems by providing better access to medical care, minimizing emergency room visits, and preventing costly hospitalizations. Stable housing also decreases reliance on emergency services, crisis interventions, and the criminal justice system, which ultimately saves taxpayer dollars.


Red the full article here


What's Happening In Your Community?


Is there an issue in your loved one's home that you need help with?

Do you have information or a news story you would like to share?

Is there legislation in your state house that needs attention?


Contact us at info@vor.net


VOR Bill Watch:


So far this year, there have been nearly 400 bills introduced in the 119th Congress.


Currently, there have been no bills introduced in the 119th Congress that affect the lives of people with I/DD or autism.



[Please click on blue link to view information about the bill]



VOR SUPPORTS:



VOR OPPOSES:



VOR supports increasing funding for people with I/DD, but we have concerns with bills would discriminate against people with the most severe I/DD and autism and jeopardize the higher-care facilities or employment programs that are most appropriate to their needs.



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