Waiver to help ease cost of disabled care
Published 12:00 am Monday, December 23, 2002
Changes in Ohio's assistance programs could ease the financial burden for those in Lawrence County who choose to care for their disabled family members within their own homes.
The goal of the level one waiver program, administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is to assist families whose children or dependents have mental or physical disabilities but do not require nursing home care, said Paul Mollett, superintendent of the Lawrence County Board of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities
"It is a wonderful program," he said. "It will allow us to up the care provided for those with MRDD."
Families could receive up to $5,000 a year to help pay for services that would normally be billable to Medicaid such as providing a part-time in-home assistant and paying transportation costs.
Although announced earlier this week, waivers are not a new concept. Individual option waivers have been available for some time but are difficult to receive and provide assistance only if the patient requires full-time care in a nursing home, Mollett said.
Mollett said this reform has been in the works for a long time. The law changed in 1999 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that disabled people should have the choice of receiving care at home instead of in nursing facilities.
"This is much smaller in scope but very meaningful to this county and the people in MRDD," he said. "This will be an incredible amount of assistance to elderly parents who physically can't care for their children as well as they have in the past."
Currently, 22 people in Lawrence County are on the individual option waivers and 30 more on the waiting list.
Some of these families will be eligible for this new issue one waiver, he said.
"A lot of parents were saying, 'If I just had some help I could keep my child at home,'" Mollett said. "There are a lot of families that need a smaller assistance than the individual option waivers."
The waivers could be issued in February or March at the latest. Also, an intermediate waiver may be created next year that will provide assistance between the individual option and the issue one waivers, Mollett said.
"Folks with MRDD are no different than anyone else," he said. "It is often not necessary for members to go to nursing facilities and may even make more financial sense.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, as many as 3,000 families will be enrolled within the first year and could accommodate 6,000 families within three years.
Under the previous waiver system, federal Medicaid funds could only be used to pay for care at a nursing home or similar facility. Applicants must meet Medicaid income requirements to be eligible for the new waiver, he said.