The legislature’s state budget conference committee, made up of six members of the House and Senate’s respective Ways & Means Committees, decided on a final version of the fiscal year 2016 Massachusetts budget.
The $38.1 billion plan that is being sent to the Governor for his approval does not include the Home Care Alliance’s priority language that created a special commission to study and recommend licensure options for private care agencies. The commission language was included in the Senate’s version, but not the House, which left the conference committee to decide its fate.
The conference committee also did not include an expansion of income eligibility for services ordered through Aging Service Access Points (ASAPs) that the Alliance also supported.
One bright spot was that an advisory council on “mobile integrated healthcare” (MIH) was passed and includes a representative of the Home Care Alliance. The language defines MIH as:
a health care program approved by the department [of public health] that utilizes mobile resources to deliver care and services to patients in an out-of-hospital environment in coordination with health care facilities or other health care providers. Such medical care and services include, but are not limited to, community paramedic provider services, chronic disease management, behavioral health, preventative care, post-discharge follow-up visits, or transport or referral to facilities other than hospital emergency departments.
Other notes from a preliminary analysis of the Conference Committee’s budget include the following:
- The MassHealth Managed Care line item continued to grow by another $770 million while MassHelath Senior Care, which governs the Senior Care Options program, dipped by more than $10 million.
- In the Elder Affairs line items, State Home Care Program “Purchased Services” was set by the conference committee at about $2 million below FY15 spending, although the Enhanced Community Options Program (ECOP) grew by nearly $5.6 million.
- Thanks to the efforts of home care supporter Senator Sal DiDomenico, the funding for the Pediatric Palliative Care Network was raised to $1.8 million from $1.5 million in FY15, but that’s still inadequate to serve the number of children currently on a waiting list for such care.
- The Department of Higher Education’s “Nursing and Allied Health Workforce” line item ended up being level funded at $200,000 after being zeroed out by the Governor earlier this year.
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