Seniors deserve the choice to stay in their homes and neighborhoods
By John Kerry
Berkshire Senior recently asked Senator John Kerry, "What is being done at the federal level to give low and middle income seniors, including those in Berkshire
County, the “choice” to help them continue to live in their own homes and communities with dignity and independence as long as possible?
Below is his response.
I saw firsthand through the eyes of my aging parents just how much more their roots in the community meant to them with each passing year. They weren’t any different from hundreds of thousands of seniors in Massachusetts, a state which is at its core a patchwork of thousands of unique neighborhoods stretching from the Berkshires to Boston. Generations of families have lived in the same neighborhood, on the same block, for centuries. Mothers send their daughters to the same grammar school they attended, just as their own mothers' did decades earlier. At some churches, parishioners can’t remember when certain families didn’t sit in a particular pew. We’re a place rooted in history and we’re a people who understand the value of community.
But soaring housing prices and skyrocketing health care costs are forcing many Massachusetts seniors to abandon their beloved homes and neighborhoods and move to more affordable homes or managed care facilities. It is a terrible situation that robs seniors of their dignity, dishonors their years of financial sacrifice and denies the very people who have lived their lives building community a sense of community.
Many senior citizens on fixed incomes have few options when faced with mounting home costs and end up using the payer of “last resort,” Medicaid, which continues to push them into institutional care. It’s a broken system which forces seniors to often relocate far away from their families and friends and also places an enormous financial burden on the taxpayers.
In response to this growing problem, I am developing legislation in the Senate to significantly increase access to quality home and community-based services (HCBS) and address Medicaid’s push towards institutional-care. My legislation will address three key issues facing seniors in Massachusetts:
• Increase Access to Home and Community-Based Services. HCBS are cost-effective, highly effective and extremely popular with seniors and their families. My bill will give Massachusetts and other states additional options to pursue HCBS strategies for Medicaid beneficiaries and amend “asset transfer” provisions of the 2006 Deficit Reduction Act which prevent services from reaching senior citizens in a timely fashion.
• Prevent and Delay Disability. Disability is difficult to prevent, whether it due to aging or cognitive/mental disorders. Nonetheless, the Medicaid program should be fixed to help delay the onset and severity of disability by funding programs that help seniors manage existing chronic diseases, stop smoking, increase nutrition/exercise and prevent falls.
• Ensure Quality in HCBS through Workforce Investment. The quality of HCBS is directly tied to our ability to ensure a strong, stable workforce of nurses and other professionals to provide in-home care and community-based services. My bill will build on important work already being done at the state level to increase workforce recruitment, training, and retention. And consumers of HCBS do best when they are in charge of their own lives — by consolidating and integrating state HCBS, beneficiaries will be better able to determine their own appropriate services and care workers.
With the millions of aging Baby Boomers already testing the limits of many government programs, we need to act now to give seniors what they deserve — independence, control, availability, quality and dignity — so they can choose to live out what should be their golden years in the neighborhoods and communities they helped to build.
John Kerry is the U.S. senator from Massachusetts. He can be contacted at (617) 565-8519 or email him from his website http://kerry.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm.
