Home Health & Hospice Week

Watch out for Medicaid changes.

A number of mainstream news outlets covered the Aug. 21 ruling in the case determining whether home health agency workers are exempt from overtime and minimum wage requirements.

Some stories hailed the ruling about the new Department of Labor rule which would no longer allow HHA employees to qualify for the exemption from Fair Labor Standards Act requirements — and maligned the home care industry. “The industry has thwarted campaigns for fair pay for 40 years,” said an editorial on the New York Times website. “It does not want to lose the profits it gains by paying substandard wages.”

The decision is “a major legal victory for in-home caregivers,” CareLinx CEO Sherwin Sheik said in a blog post for Huffington Post. Home care agencies and their reps “lobbied aggressively against any efforts to provide such pay protections to homecare workers, putting their financial interests ahead of those who labor on their behalf.”

“Everyone — whether we receive care, provide care, or coordinate care for our loved ones — benefits from improving the quality of jobs for America’s home care aides,” said the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute.

But others pointed out the flaws with the appeals court decision. If the ruling stands, “it’s a pretty significant upheaval of the way things have been done for a long time,” attorney Peter Godfrey with Hodgson Russ told Buffalo Business First newspaper. “These are employers that have thousands of employees doing home health services working on an incredibly thin margin and largely on public assistance. There is not a pile of money to cover the additional costs that would be incurred, so it really presents a challenge for the industry.”

“Certainly you have to start paying overtime for cases that were not previously required so it may impact profitability and the ability to even provide that care in certain circumstances,” Todd Lyles, senior vice president of administration at Almost Family, told the newspaper. Almost Family is assessing its options, but won’t make any changes until there’s a final court decision, he said.

It’s not just HHAs that will be affected. The ruling may cause Medicaid to cut services. For example, the budget for Kansas’ Medicaid program, known as KanCare, doesn’t include the $12 million needed to pay the higher wages, notes KMUW. State officials say services may now have to be reduced.