Media Release

For Immediate Release

Contact: Bruce Darling: (585) 370-669, Chris Hilderbrant: (585) 267-0343

August 17, 2008

“The Governor’s budget cuts paint a bull’s eye on the backs of people with disabilities,” asserted Bruce Darling, Executive Director of the Center for Disability Rights, Inc., who’s spent much of last week in Albany working against devastating cuts proposed by Governor Patterson.
Despite the fact that Independent Living Centers and home care are critical services for people with disabilities in New York State, Governor Paterson has proposed serious cuts to these vital, cost-effective services. The disability community cannot stand by and watch as essential community-based services are dismantled.

Independent Living Centers (ILCs) throughout the state are mounting a campaign to let the Governor know how harmful these cuts are and urge him to support, not cut, community-based services.

“In two days last week, nearly two thousand letters, faxes, emails and phone calls reached the Governor and other policy makers who are targeting people with disabilities and direct care workers on whom many of us depend,” said Chris Hilderbrant, CDR’s Director of Advocacy. “The efforts are continuing this week in Albany.”

Home Care

The Governor is proposing to cut home care by eliminating the “trend factor” that adjusts for rising costs of doing business, and cutting an additional 1% from reimbursement rates. Home care, including both consumer directed and traditional home health approaches, is a critical part of our state’s long term care system and it provides a real alternative to placement in a nursing facility. Seniors and people with disabilities who need regular assistance overwhelmingly prefer home care over nursing homes and institutions, and home care services are generally more cost effective than institutional. Home care also helps prevent illness and the need for expensive hospital stays.

These proposed cuts to home care will directly affect home care workers and the people who depend on them! Home care agencies simply won’t have the funds to pay out scheduled wage increases for a year and a half. Because they won’t be able to get even a basic cost-of-living increase some home care workers will be forced to change careers at a time when we face a critical shortage of direct care workers. Proposed rate reductions will make providing home care in rural communities even harder due to increased mileage and high gas prices, and all of these changes will result in more people with disabilities being forced into more costly institutional settings because they can’t get the support they need to remain in the community!

If the home care cuts go through, the Center for Disability Rights will lose approximately $1.8 million by the end of 2009.

Independent Living

The Governor has proposed cutting ILCs by 6% on “remaining disbursements,” that is, a reduction in the remaining balance of spending this year. ILCs were already cut by 2% this year so this cut would be on top of the original cut to ILC funding in the enacted FY 2008 state budget. The governor has also proposed that the 6% cut in ILC base funding carry over into FY 2009 and beyond. That means the Governor has proposed to reduce on-going Center funding by 8%!

If these cuts go through, the Regional Center for Independent Living would lose as much as $24,000 per year.