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Disabled Health Care Faces Budget Cuts

Some Handicapped Clients Will Have Fewer Hours Of Service

JASMINA MEYER/Highlands Today

Beverly Bostick brushes her son's, Antonio, 13, teeth after feeding him a snack Thursday evening in Avon Park.

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By Douglas  Carman | Highlands Today

Published: June 30, 2008

SEBRING — Beverly Bostick makes her living taking care of the severely handicapped among other kids at her Avon Park foster home, but it's still hectic for her when one of her own children qualify for the extra help.

Her son Troy, 25, has had multiple kidney failures, cerebral palsy, autism and chronic pneumonia. He goes around with a bladder bag attached to his right leg that holds his urine. His mom also had to install a special air filter for their air conditioning for him. He can walk, but he communicates only through screams, moans and gestures.

Bostick also takes care of Henry, a 25-year-old who she took in as a foster child, and Antonio, 13, whom she adopted. Both of them are wheelchair-bound with cerebral palsy. Henry trains on a computer with a specialized track ball that he pushes with his tightly flexed finger so that he can coordinate his hand movements.

Troy needs people to bathe him, shave him and even wipe him after he uses the bathroom.

"They can never be left alone," Bostick said.

A round of budget cuts effective July 1 at the Florida Agency for Persons with Disabilities — which funds the providers who feed, wash, train and care for severely disabled people like Troy — may force some other patients to lose some of those services.

Troy Bostick had 70 operations, including a surgery at Florida Hospital last Tuesday to insert a pubic catheter. Beverly declined to say how much Troy's health care cost her but said the 70 operations weren't entirely covered by Medicaid, and neither will any other disabled person's care on a Medicaid waiver, even before the pending cuts.

Beverly Bostick is not losing her services but said that affected families may have to choose which services they may have to give up.

According to a notice on the agency's Web page, the state asked them to cut provider rates by more than $43.5 million. To do that, the agency will cut rates for most service providers by 3 to 7 percent for services such as behavioral counseling, transportation and several types of home care.

This is a second wave of cuts issued this year to disabled services. To cut expenses, support coordinators were told in January that they could handle up to 43 clients, when previously they handled a maximum of 36, the site stated.

Sebring-based Visions ADT Executive Director Barbara Cook said the combined cutbacks would amount to a 28-percent drop in funding for intensive personal care.

The bottom line, she said, is that clients will get funding for only a total of 30 hours per week of support, whether that involves training, companion care, transportation or any other kind of service.

Until today, a different cap was placed on individual services that would often total over 40 hours, a healthy individual's typical work week.

A new tier system was also supposed to be implemented July 1 that would have set caps for services to all but the most severely disabled, but it has been contested.

Eric Olsen, the area administrator for the Agency for Persons with Disability's Area 14, which includes Highlands, Polk and Hardee counties, said the three-county area has 1,080 people who are on some form of Medicaid waiver for disabled services.

Those who are losing services should have received a letter saying so, and should go to their support coordinator for help, he said.

The biggest setback from these cuts would involve the 900 people in the area on the waiting list. Olsen doubted that any new people would be added to the waivers.

When applying for these types of services through Medicaid, the wait typically lasts "years," Olsen added.

Sebring resident Mike Lukazewski is also using the Medicaid waiver program to care for two adult children of his own that have cerebral palsy, like the three men in Bostick's home. Lukazewski's children also cannot walk and have the mental capacities of 8-month-olds.

He complained to Highlands Today about the cuts he was going to get last October, when his two children, who had a combined 212 hours of care covered by a Medicaid waiver, would only get 180 hours by January. Even though Lukazewski fought that off for himself, he said most others ended up with losses, and now they're facing even more.

Lukazewski now thinks more people in his situation need to speak up to stop these cuts.

"I was the only one that sat up there and fought," he said.

Reporter Doug Carman can be reached at 386-5838 or dcarman@highlandstoday.com

Note: A previous version of this story mentioned an incorrect profession when referring to increased caseloads created in January. Also, the incorrect day for Troy Bostick's surgery was stated.

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