A Key Part Of Biden's 'Care' Agenda And One Lawmaker's Crusade For It
Many of us have personal connections to this issue. Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell is in a position to do something about it.
Reform causes succeed when they have effective champions and frequently those champions are elected officials with personal connections to the cause.
Today at HuffPost, I tell the story of one such cause and one such champion.
The cause is "home and community-based care," or HCBS. It refers to services and supports that allow the elderly and people with disabilities to live on their own, to attend school or to hold down jobs and, more generally, to stay out of large institutions. The champion is Debbie Dingell, the Michigan House Democrat who learned first-hand why these programs are so important -- and why securing them is difficult for so many families.
She came by this experience when her husband, the legislative giant John Dingell, was in retirement and in his final years. He was in not-terrible health for most of that time but, still, he needed support at home. Dingell had to figure out how to pay for it and, then, she had to find people to provide it. Both were major challenges. And as she told me in an interview, if it was tough for her, a member of Congress with enough money to pay out of pocket, you can understand how hard it is for Americans with less stature and money.
John and Debbie Dingell, via debbiedingell.house.gov
To rectify that, Dingell has partnered with Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and outside advocacy groups to write legislation that would dramatically increase funding for HCBS, while boosting caregiver pay and adding new measures to monitor quality. President Biden's "American Jobs Plan" included $400 billion for HCBS funding, in what was effectively a placeholder to put some version of the Dingell-Casey bill into whatever spending legislation Democrats pass later this year.
Reasonable people can (and do!) disagree over the merits of what Dingell and Casey are proposing, both conceptually and in the policy specifics. But it seems pretty clear the money would make a difference -- at the very least, by reducing and maybe wiping out waiting lists for these services that today have more than 800,000 names on them.
But the HCBS proposal is competing with several other popular, potentially transformative initiatives for a limited set of financial and political resources. The $400 billion number (which advocates wish was even higher) is likely to come down in the course of legislative negotiations and it could come *way* down. I've heard from multiple sources, privy to discussions, who say there's talk of reducing it by more than half.
Of course, everything is in flux. And Dingell isn't the only lawmaker visibly promoting the HCBS cause. Among the others is Maggie Hassan, the Democratic senator from New Hampshire who co-sponsored the Dingell-Casey proposal. She has spoken frequently about her son, who has cerebral palsy, and how that influences her worldview.
The personal interest in caregiving from both Dingell and Hassan reminds me of some other recent stories, about the push for more child care funding by two other Democratic senators, Patty Murray and Elizabeth Warren. Murray is a former preschool teacher, Warren was once a special needs teacher. Both have spoken about their struggles to find child care when they were working mothers, and how that motivates them now.
Yes, there's a pattern here, one that helps explain why caregiving is getting more attention than ever in politics, although it remains to be seen just how much that attention translates into action.
You can find the article here:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/home-care-elderly-disabilities-dingell_n_60f4381ae4b01ba8eed71236
Thanks for reading!