New PCA approval

I got my new approval for personal care assistantance hours in the mail today.  My hours will stay the same until July 24^th 2009.  I will continue receiving 112.5 hours per week of care for this time period.  According to my fiscal intermediary I receive more care than 90% of the people they service.  The reason I get this much care is because I am annoying and it’s easier to give me what I want rather than go through all the appeals processes and lose anyway, which they have five times.

I know many people who need more care than I do, but don’t get it because they are not annoying.  They don’t wish to bother anyone; they’d rather suffer in silence.  Been there.  Done that.  Moved on.

Because it used to really bother me to figure out how much money I was costing the government and whether I was a worthy enough person to receive all my services, I promised a nun (I’m not kidding) not to add up these numbers again unless there was a purpose.  Well, today I found one.

My personal care assistants are currently paid $10.84/hour 8:00 am to midnight.  At night, they only get paid $32.52 for the entire overnight shift, which runs from midnight to 8:00am.  Apparently the state thinks that everyone with a disability goes to bed at 9:00.  I don’t, and I don’t know many other people who do, unless they’re children (but the way children’s PCA services are managed in this state is another blog entirely).  PCA’s receive four paid time and a half days per year: Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, (very importantly, not New Year’s Eve, when everybody wants to go out) and the fourth of July.  They also receive no health insurance, which, as a health educator, bothers me greatly.  I don’t think it’s fair that the people who help me manage my healthcare cannot afford to go to the doctor’s when they are sick.

At the current rate of pay, my services cost $63,907.22.  At the proposed increase to $12.00/hour, that SEIU 1199 (the union which PCA’s across the state voted to join two years ago) is proposing my services will cost $70,746 (but will not include health insurance).  That’s over $16,000 more than what the cost to Massachusetts would be if I lived in a nursing home, according to Kiplinger’s Retirement Report, which cited cost at $87,500 in March of 2004.  I have no later figures, though I suspect the price has gone up.

Yet every year, some person who doesn’t know me, or at least not well, comes into my house and asks me if I really require all the hours the state currently gives me.  Sometimes I want to say, although I never do, “Can’t you people do math?”