Suit Filed to Protect California In-Home Care Services
October 08, 2009
United Domestic Workers (UDW/AFSCME) has gone to court, along with several other plaintiffs, to prevent more than 100,000 low-income seniors and the disabled from losing critical in-home care services.
The class-action lawsuit was filed Oct. 1 in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, on behalf of in-home care recipients and caregivers. It seeks to block the state of California from imposing budget cuts that would “render tens of thousands” of individuals ineligible to participate in the In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) program.
“By cutting IHSS, the governor and the Legislature are actually putting people’s lives at risk,” says UDW Pres. Laura Reyes, an AFSCME International vice president. “A person with Alzheimer’s may be capable of cooking and cleaning for herself, but without assistance, she is likely to leave the stove on after she finishes cooking and burn her house down.”
At the heart of the lawsuit is the question of whether the state can make more than $53 million in budget cuts in the state-run care program by using a person’s “Functional Index” score. The score is a number assigned by a social worker to a client that denotes that person’s ability to perform a task, such as housekeeping.
The plaintiffs contend the scores are arbitrary and unscientific, and were never meant to be used for across-the-board decisions on benefit cuts. Their lawsuit claims the cutbacks will violate federal constitutional due process protections, theMedicaid Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
“Instead of using each consumer’s individual needs to determine what services they need, the governor and his supporters are cutting services the quick-and-dirty way,” says Reyes, whose union represents 65,000 in-home care providers throughout California. “This is arbitrary, ineffective and morally disgraceful.”
Joining UDW/AFSCME in the suit are five Service Employees International Union (SEIU) locals and four public interest law firms: Disability Rights California, Disability Rights Legal Center, National Health Law Program and National Senior Citizens Law Center.
In addition to this and other legal action, UDW/AFSCME is fighting the IHSS cuts in other ways. “We’re working to help the media and the public understand what these cuts will mean in human terms and why they are so fiscally shortsighted,” explains Doug Moore, the union’s executive director and an AFSCME International vice president.
“We’re also having meetings throughout the state to hold accountable those Democratic legislators who were ‘enablers’ for Gov. Schwarzenegger for supporting these cuts.”
AFSCME represents approximately 95,000 independent homecare providers nationwide, mostly in California, Iowa, Maryland and Missouri.
Read about the lawsuit in The Los Angeles Times, and read more about AFSCME home care workers.
