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June 14, 2006
Seniors Moving Out of Nursing Home System
Around the country, nursing homes - once consider life's final stop - are experiencing a growing number of residents who are packing up and moving out, as more and more seniors receive the help they need through home care or in assisted living settings.
The New York State Health Department, which estimates that caring for seniors in home and community settings can cost up to half as much as nursing homes, is responding to the trend: State officials hope to get a federal waiver this summer that will let up to 5,000 elderly and disabled nursing home residents on Medicaid get the same care elsewhere.
June 16, 2006
Long-term care's perfect storm
Generous benefits, perverse incentives and powerful lobbies have made New York's long-term care system the most costly in the nation, says Crain's New York Business.
Long-term care, including nursing home services and home health and personal care, consumed $16 billion in 2004. The price tag -- which comes to $833.37 per capita, or two-and-a-half times the U.S. average -- swelled 23 percent over 2000 levels.
"If there's a state that's doing everything wrong, New York is probably it," says Devon Herrick, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, which this year published a harsh critique of New York's Medicaid system.
June 20, 2006
State won't stop funding shock therapy school
The state won't stop funding a school for disabled youths despite reports of "skin shocks" that sometimes injured students for minor offenses including sloppy appearance.
The decision means the state won't interrupt the $50 million a year in funding it provides to the Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Mass., until its review is complete. The school cares for about 150 autistic and disabled children from New York.
But the state did take a step toward ending at least some shock treatments of New Yorkers at the school.
Imagine: A Run Across America
Imagine: the 100 million disabled people in developing countries, who today must crawl on the ground, suddenly owning a wheelchair. That's the goal of Free Wheelchair Mission, which will benefit from the efforts of William Hibbard, owner and CEO of New Orange Hills, a sub-acute healthcare facility, and a long time marathon runner, as he undertakes a cross-country trek to raise money to deliver 25,000 wheelchairs worldwide.
The Free Wheelchair Mission, an international non-profit organization dedicated to providing the transforming gift of mobility to the physically disabled poor in developing countries, along with media partner Reader's Digest magazine, through its website www.rd.com, will chronicle William's run, scheduled to start on his 50th birthday, Aug. 5, 2006, from Central Park's Strawberry Field in New York City; and ending 60 days later in Newport Beach, California.
Special Ed pupils in limbo
Scores of new small high schools are shutting out special education students--a controversial practice federal authorities are now examining.
The boutique schools, highly touted by Mayor Bloomberg, are not required to enroll special education students during the school's first two years. And few are equipped for teens with wheelchairs, severely limiting the students' enrollment choices.
Ashley Anderson, an eighth-grader with cerebral palsy, said she was stunned when she flipped through the city's high school directory last fall and discovered that page after page blared "no accessibility" for wheelchairs.