(Cross-posted from The COFAR Blogsite)
In responses to comments made to a federally required plan for community-based care of the developmentally disabled, the Baker administration is conceding that not all congregate care is bad or should be banned.
Yet, the administration’s draft Statewide Transition Plan (STP) still appears to prohibit or restrict most new group homes from housing more than five residents; and it would apparently restrict funding for most other congregate settings, such as farm-based residential programs. The administration is currently asking for further comments on the draft STP.
The STP is a requirement of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which issued a new regulation in 2014 governing community-based care receiving Medicaid funding. The CMS regulation is intended to reduce reliance on congregate care, but Massachusetts originally appeared to go even further than the CMS regulation in banning congregate care almost entirely.
Along with hundreds of people and other organizations, COFAR submitted comments in late 2014 to the original draft of the STP. It appears that like us, most of the commenters to that original plan were concerned that the state was going too far in banning virtually all possible forms of congregate care.
As we noted in our comments to the administration in 2014, the Department of Developmental Services appeared to be proposing a ban on new and potentially existing residential settings such as farmsteads, residential schools or settings that are part of residential schools, settings “that congregate a large number of people with disabilities for significant shared programming and staff,” and even new group homes with more than five residents. Not even CMS was advocating a complete ban on all of those residential options.
Now, after having received those critical comments, the state seems to be willing to continue to fund some forms of congregate care.
In its response to the comments, the Baker administration made the following statement:
The state acknowledges that CMS… has indicated that ‘it is not the intent of this rule (CMS’s 2014 regulation) to prohibit congregate settings from being considered home and community-based settings.’ The …characteristics of any setting (location, geography, physical characteristic and size) are not necessarily determinative of whether a provider can achieve compliance… (my emphasis).
Despite that apparent concession, the Baker administration’s STP states that DDS has determined that 14 corporate providers operating 57 group home sites are not complying with the new CMS regulation. This lack of compliance is because these residences apparently have “institutional qualities,” either because they house more than five residents or not enough services are provided by community-based providers.
The STP also states that some of these homes may have provided insufficient staff training in “person-centered planning.” (We have voiced concerns that while person-centered planning is touted as giving developmentally disabled individuals more control over the services they receive and how they pay for them, the process appears to put control over an individual’s funds into the hands of private companies.)
By the way, the administration stated in its responses to the STP comments that the state’s Building Code limits group home capacity to five residents. Our reading of the applicable Building Code regulation, however, is that it does not set a 5-person limit on all group homes, but rather specifies only that DDS group homes with five residents or less must be classified as single-family or two-family homes (see amendments to 780 CMR. 310.2).
These are, moreover, group homes, and not developmental centers, that DDS has identified as being too institutional. This raises a concern for us that the federal government and the state are pushing for ever smaller and more dispersed residential settings — a process that diverts more and more taxpayer money appropriated for the developmentally disabled into a grossly unregulated corporate-run service system.
While it appears under the STP as though DDS will allow these 14 providers some leeway in complying with the provisions in the plan, the providers will have to make a range of changes, including potentially relocating their residents to smaller residences. The STP indicated that this may result in an unspecified additional cost to the state.
The STP also noted that the Association of Developmental Disabilities Providers (ADDP), an influential lobbying organization for state-funded DDS providers, will be in charge of providing assistance to the providers in complying with the plan.
Anti-eviction agreements
One piece of potential good news is that the administration’s STP states that DDS will require providers to sign contractual agreements with residents of group homes that prevents arbitrary and capricious evictions. This is apparently another CMS requirement. This could address one of the key problems we’ve identified with provider-operated group homes, which is that they can currently evict residents with minimal notice, particularly in cases in which guardians or other advocates are seen as being pushy or meddlesome.
A portion of the STP also deals with non-residential care. What stood out was that DDS found that 170 community-based day programs operated by 98 providers did not meet CMS standards due to inadequate daily activities, staffing, and funding.
Administration still steeped in community-first ideology
Despite the apparent softening of its anti-congregate-care position, the administration’s STP still appears to be ideologically opposed to anything not considered sufficiently community-integrated, and therefore too institutional. In its response to some of the comments to the STP, the administration stated that it is its belief that:
…all individuals, regardless of their level of impairment, can benefit from integration and access to the community. (my emphasis)
The administration made this statement after noting that it recognized that “…individuals with significant disabilities live in some settings that presumptively do not satisfy the (CMS) community regulation.” The administration stated that it is not its intent “to force individuals to move from settings or to take away needed services and supports.” But that is exactly what DDS did when it closed or downsized four developmental centers in Massachusetts, starting in 2008.
So, in effect, while the administration says in the STP that it recognizes that some individuals live in non-community-based settings, it still maintains that all developmentally disabled individuals, regardless of their level of disability, could benefit from being moved to the community system. It is a community system, however, in which at least some of the services and supports available in “institutional” settings would most probably be taken away.
On the one hand, the administration acknowledges that it is not the size of a care setting that determines whether it is institutional or not, but rather the services provided and the commitment of the staff. Yet the administration consistently overlooks the fact that just because a care setting is small, that doesn’t guarantee it will be integrated into the community.
In a perceptive post, Jill Escher, president of The Autism Society San Francisco Bay Area, notes that the real purpose of the new CMS regulation is not to eliminate institutional care, but rather “to put the brakes on the creation of new residences and programs that cater specifically to adults with autism and other intellectual and developmental disabilities.”
In other words, programs for the developmentally disabled cost money, and the CMS is looking to save money by simply eliminating those services.
Here’s Escher’s very apt description of the impact of the CMS regulation and the transition plans of states like Massachusetts:
Though the (CMS) rules talk of “person-centered” and “outcome-oriented” services, where individuals are not “isolated” and are free from coercion and restraint, in Orwellian doublespeak fashion, civil rights and liberation is not the true endgame here. The overwhelming goal is to restrict out-of-home options.
In practice the rules mean if you’re sitting at your parents’ home doing nothing, or in your own apartment without on-site staff, that’s “community integration.” Meanwhile if you prefer a well staffed adult autism program or housing complex, where you are cared for and safe, engaged in the community, and in the company of your friends who may have similar disabilities, your choice is ironically deemed “isolating” by bureaucrats. And therefore subject to the CMS axe.
Jill Barker, who writes The DD News Blog, adds:
Congregate care, providing services to people with disabilities in group settings, is one of many practical solutions to the need for long-term care. It allows for the sharing of resources and lessening of feelings of isolation. It should not be ruled out as an option, although that appears to be the intent of many advocacy organizations.
In my opinion, there is also a quiet war on families who are offered no other alternative but to keep their adult child with DD at home with services that may not be adequate to provide the family with the relief they need and a good quality of life for their disabled family member for the long term.
Parents want their young adult children to develop some autonomy, but the system is stacked towards keeping them in the parents’ home and proving services more suitable to the very elderly being cared for by children or spouses. It infantilizes them.
My community has land set aside and builders identified to create an eight apartment facility with concierge service for autistic youth in their 20’s. Money, community, and supporters are all in place. The only enemy is the Commonwealth.
Support it but don’t push to implement it, the classic “centrist” position. And ya’ll want to know why I am fed up with centrist Democrats or any Democrat that does not identify as progressive.
No action, all words….that’s a centrist position on so many topics.
I see. So you use the behavior of a Republican governor as a cudgel to attack Democrats.
I’m pretty sure that all of us here are familiar with how “fed up” you are with Democrats. What remains unclear to me is whether you are ready or able to move past your hostility and into something more positive.
Let me suggest that the issue we’re discussing here is not “centrist” Republicans or Democrats, at least when it comes to implementation of a policy. The reluctance to pursue more aggressive implementation of policy like this is surely a direct consequence of the state REVENUE CRISIS.
Massachusetts law requires that the state run a balanced budget. We have under-taxed ourselves for decades, and the effects of our irresponsibility are all around us. Any money spent on implementation of one program comes at the expense of another.
It seems to me that a more constructive way to address this issue is to demand that ALL our government officials — Republicans, Democrats, “centrists”, “liberals”, “conservatives, whatever — raise taxes on the wealthy so that the state has the funds to implement the programs that our government agrees are important.
..of a project not dependent on state financing or Republican philosophical dogma. It is instead a victim of progressive dogma, that it is appropriate to mainstream and isolate all with disabilities in order to perpetuate a government system that routinely fails its clients.
I won’t stress the good jobs at good Wages aspects of this, because I think they sincerely believe it. But there is some aspect of terror over the idea that other entities could supply services outside of their infrastructure that might be better.