Editorial written by Nancy Becker Kennedy
Submitted to the LA Times.

According to Washington Post and Bloomberg news “IBM’s Benchmark research firm found that online spending was 33 percent higher than the same period last year and was 29.3 percent higher than Black Friday 2011.” Boy brick-and-mortar stores just can’t rake in as much money as all those cyber sales.  Too bad for the IHSS program, and all the other crucial safety net programs, that a lot of those huge sales didn’t generate any taxes for California this year.  It’s really bad when you consider that they’re deciding to make 20% trigger cuts to the In-Home Supportive Services Program (IHSS) and other vital safety net services based on the revenues that are generated by this December.  And what’s really a pity it is that the law depriving our state of the lifeblood they need to keep the safety net intact, these “Amazon taxes” aren’t going to be generated for the state of California until 2012.  Wow if only we had that revenue now!

If you had to kill a bunch of kittens and you really didn’t want to, I guess the easiest way would be to put them all in a bag and beat them with a bat.  Later you could shake out the bag and see which ones survived. That’s a little like what’s happening to seniors and people disabilities, the blind, the poor, the homeless and mentally ill as the lifeboat is getting smaller and cuts are being made. 

I’ll talk about IHSS services program because that’s the program I’m most familiar with.  I was on the committee that wrote the founding ordinance for the Personal Assistance Services Council of Los Angeles County that oversees the in-home supportive services needs of about half of the states 400,000 seniors and persons with disabilities. I’ve served as a board member on it for about 10 years. 

We always knew the program was going to explode when the baby boomers retired. It’s a wildly popular program because it gives people the dignity of living in their own homes when they need help, does so at a fraction of the cost of nursing home care, and because all the government money goes directly into the pockets of the people who care for us. No overhead or profits for agencies. Just the best bang for your buck with all the money going directly to the people who help us. By the way, I am a woman with quadriplegia who broke her neck at age 20, who as been fortunate enough to make a productive contribution to this community for 40 years after breaking my neck.  The only reason I could do that was because of In-Home Supportive Services.  And while I was making my contribution, caregivers too numerous to count, as I look back, avoided homelessness, needing public assistance, or made money to go to college or get their children what they needed.

As we predicted long ago, the program is mushrooming as the demographic ages.  What hasn’t changed is the inestimable value of this remarkably cost-effective way to keep hundreds of thousands of Californians employed, and hundreds of thousands of seniors and people disabilities living dignified and productive lives.  It is a miracle of public policy.

Since the recall of Gray Davis though, the attacks on the IHSS program and its vulnerable recipients have ranged from anxiety provoking to vicious.  People have had armed state

officials making unannounced home visits, frightening some of them and their caregivers so much that some of the caregivers quit working for the senior or person with a disability– who then in turn had the difficult task of finding someone new who wanted to do often backbreaking work for low wages. And then the laws were changed so that these people who did very difficult work had to come up with money for criminal background checks in advance and wait for months for their paychecks.  The seniors and people disabilities and their caregivers were demonized to justify cutting them from the program as frauds and criminals.  One profile in courage during this onslaught was a DPSS Director, Lee Collins of San Luis Obispo County who refused to take fraud prevention money with words to the effect that he didn’t want to frighten a bunch of seniors and people disabilities to give Governor Schwarzenegger cover for cutting the program and that such fraud claims in the absence of data was “trumpeting at a ghost.” 

He predicted correctly.  Since that time, a bunch of seniors and people disabilities have been frightened and have been experiencing waves and waves of assaults on the program, themselves, and their providers.  Changes to the program that make their lives harder, take money that could provide service hours, frighten them with claims that they’re criminals, and put them at the receiving end of political Russian Roulette games with their lives by rules that threaten them with institutionalization every two years or so.  First they wanted to cut some of the people on the program, then others with relatives providing their care with prison records, then take away our laundry and housecleaning. Money was spent to create costly the orientations where they showed alarming movies to our incoming providers we were lucky enough to find and threatening them with jail.  Now we are under the threat of the 20% trigger cuts if revenues don’t reach a certain point by December 15. 

Too bad we won’t be getting those taxes from those cyber sales, and too bad a bill that would have restored former Governor Wilson’s emergency tax brackets to people who made over $400,000 a year never made it through the legislature. And our states Republicans wouldn’t even let the citizens of California vote in if they wanted to continue the modest elevation on sales taxes that expired. 

Governor Brown is looking at realignment of the IHSS program, moving its operation from the county level to the state level.  I guess it makes it easier not to see the people as they’re being dropped from the program.

Last night the wind storm was really scary.  I gave a dollar to a homeless man. I felt scared he’d try to climb in my van. Why not?  The wind scared me inside the safety of my car.  I was pretty despairing because I just read a newspaper article about how many fewer shelters there are than people who need them, now that so many people are out of jobs.  When the wind was blowing so hard, first I thought it was lucky the tents were already removed from Occupy Los Angeles — but then this morning I thought maybe not.  Maybe we should see people when we’re hurting them.  Maybe some of us should be down in Los Angeles so the homeless people who lie in those streets become visible to us.

Or maybe we’ll just keep beating the bag full of kittens with a baseball bat and seeing who survives.  Looking with your eyes open to what you’re doing to people is just too much for some.  Hey, maybe we could offset that prison overcrowding program by having violent felons beat up some of these pesky people in the safety net. Just a modest proposal. Which ever way you hurt people, though, it seems like you should have to look at what you’re doing.

Nancy Becker Kennedy
Mft Hollywood Sunset Free Clinic
Board Member since it’s inception of the Personal Assistance Services